Google

Video Chat is about to enter the Early Majority Phase with iPhone 4

Posted in Analysis, Apple, Business, Google, Strategy on June 22nd, 2010 by leodirac – 7 Comments

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 [...]

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Parting thoughts on working at Google

Posted in Amazon, Economics, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Personal Growth on May 13th, 2010 by leodirac – 1 Comment

It’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 [...]

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How to enable real-time collaboration in Google Docs word-processor

Posted in Google, Hacks, User Experience on April 22nd, 2010 by leodirac – 1 Comment

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 [...]

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How training in Physics is relevant to work at Google

Posted in Ego, Google, Physics, Science, Tech Industry on April 17th, 2010 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

As 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 [...]

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Good April Fool’s Jokes

Posted in Geek, Google, Humor, Microsoft on April 1st, 2010 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

Nothing 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 [...]

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Google chat adds web-based file transfer

Posted in Geek, Google, Social Computing, XMPP on March 31st, 2010 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

I’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 [...]

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Speaking at PNACP Spring Conference

Posted in Education, Ego, Google, Physics on March 29th, 2010 by leodirac – 1 Comment

I’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.  [...]

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Apple moves downmarket: iPhone as a services platform

Posted in Analysis, Apple, Business, Cloud Computing, Google, Hardware, Marketing, Tech Industry on August 3rd, 2008 by leodirac – 2 Comments

Coincident 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…

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Google launches web chat client for iPhone

Posted in Ego, Google, XMPP on July 2nd, 2008 by leodirac – 1 Comment

Wonder 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.

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The Microhoo! deal is all about network effects

Posted in Analysis, Business, Economics, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo on February 4th, 2008 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

Although 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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