Alliance Blog Reviews

What’s with Google and their constant upgrades and innovations? What is it with these guys? You would think that they are trying to improve and stuff. The latest, and personally I think one of the coolest, service introductions is the “Near You Now” feature on Google.com for mobile. It’s pretty simple. Your location is known by Google (if you allow it of course) so it simply tells you what is “near you now” with regard to restaurants, local services (i.e. animal hospitals, dentists, drugstores, gyms, parking lots etc), coffee shops, lodging, shopping and a lot more. Google’s blog tells us a bit more : “Near me now” was designed to address two user problems. First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you’re standing right in front of a business or if it’s just a short walk away. Second, we wanted to make searching for popular categories of nearby places really simple. Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don’t see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using “Near me now”. To search other categories of places not shown, “Browse more categories” provides access to our local search product with more category choices. Pretty slick. Watch out other local apps like Yelp. This one really works although I can’t figure out why my location keeps coming up with Chinese characters but I’ll survive (neither me or my iPod have been to China unless that’s where it was “born”?). Anyway, “Near me now” is currently available in the US for iPhone (OS 3.x) or Android-powered devices with version 2.0.1 or later. While this video demo is one of the cheesiest ever, it does show how the service works. Try to ignore the music, I dare you.

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Google Tells What is “Near You Now”

paidContent reports today that private equity company Providence Equity Partners, one of the backers of Hulu, is rumored to be joining up with Baidu for a Chinese equivalent of the popular professional video content site. While China is the largest Internet population (350M) and a huge market for ad dollars in just about every online arena, it’s little wonder both the Chinese search giant and the American investment firm are interested. While Providence declined comment, other sources told PC the deal was already closed. Reuters reports that the new video site would launch in the first quarter of this year. Providence will back it with $60M, while Baidu is fronting $10M. A recently-departed China Mobile executive is rumored to be the CEO of the new site. Analysys International reports that the Chinese online video market was worth 162 million yuan ($23.73 million) in the third quarter of last year—again, little wonder these two companies are interested in the market. On the other hand, this is considerably less than the well-established US video advertising market, of which Hulu controlled some 10% (and commanded similar ad rates to TV). Could a Chinese Hulu take over the same proportion of the Chinese ad market (to the tune of $9.5M)? Hard to say, of course. Before Hulu came along, it seemed doubtful that a site with such a model could succeed—but now it does appear to be successful, as well as a major source for online video content. Naturally, Providence and Baidu would need Chinese television stations and studios to sign on to create the professional content. And while the US isn’t the best counterexample here, China has a reputation for rampant online video piracy that may diminish the appeal (and the restrictions) of a site like Hulu. What do you think? Can Baidu expand its empire successfully with this? Or is China just not the market for another Hulu? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Baidu Getting into Video?

Just a week after Google launched its URL shortener, Goo.gl, it’s premiering another one, this time for YouTube . And because we can’t stand to learn yet another URL shortener name, they’re going with youtu.be . To use the new shortener, you just append the video ID to youtu.be/, so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKOTClyVrIc become http://youtu.be/PKOTClyVrIc . Shall we count them together? That saves us 13 whole characters . Now, in a limited-capacity message, like Twitter, those 13 characters might come in handy (“no rickroll!!”). Clearly, youtu.be is not intended as a full-featured URL shortener: it won’t work for other domains, there are no custom options, and it’s not as short as possible. In the YouTube blog post, they say that this integrates with the AutoShare features of account holders to link up with Google Reader and Twitter. However, if you haven’t enabled AutoShare, or are not a signed-in member, and you want to just Tweet from the Share menu below the video window, they haven’t put youtu.be into action yet. In fact, a lot of the time, if you want to use it, you’ll have to manually remove the other parts of the video URL. The feature does have its good points: as the blog post points out, when you see a youtu.be link, you know you’re going to a YouTube video. Its integration with Twitter allows developers to show thumbnails, embed directly or track stats in real-time. What do you think? Will you use youtu.be?

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YouTube Gets (Not Really) Shorter Links

When will the "top blah, blah list of 2009" madness stop? I’m thinking that once Wolfram|Alpha releases its "top mathematical equations of 2009" list, we’ll know that it’s time to move on. In the meantime, YouTube is taking great delight in telling us the kind of junk we all enjoyed watching online. If this is any indication of our what we watch on the web, I’m pretty sure that TV networks don’t have to worry about online video cannibalizing their audiences: Most Watched YouTube videos (Global): 1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views) 2. David After Dentist (37+ million views) 3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views) 4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views) 5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views) Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*: 1. Pitbull "I Know You Want Me" (82+ million views) 2. Miley Cyrus "The Climb" (64+ million views) 3. Miley Cyrus "Party in the U.S.A." (54+ million views) 4. The Lonely Island "I’m On a Boat" (48+ million views) 5. Keri Hilson "Knock You Down " (35+ million views) If I were Susan Boyle, I’d get cracking on a cover of a Miley Cyrus song pretty darn quick! I’ll leave you with my favorite from the list: Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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YouTube’s Most Watched Videos of 2009? Susan Boyle Battles a Pitbull

When we shared Google’s first TV ad for its Chrome browser, Marketing Pilgrim’s had mixed opinions about it: some hate it, some loved it. OK, so now we have a new series of TV ads out of Google’s UK office. What do you think of these? My take? I grew up in England–and our UK readers can will relate to this–but the ads look like they were directed by the creator of Bagpuss ! ( via Mashable )

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Will the New Google Chrome TV Ads Convince You to Dump Firefox or IE?

Leave it to Eric Schmidt to stir up a hornet’s nest more often than not. Of course, he is a favorite target of everyone since he is the CEO of the most recognizable brand on the planet. Whether by design or not though, he is often saying something or other that is getting people in a tizzy. Admittedly, it takes A LOT less these days to get people into this state and that is one of the downsides of this new digital age. Despite the sensitivity threshold being much lower when Schmidt appears to downplay the notion of online privacy, there will be blood. As cnet reports Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the latest Silicon Valley CEO to draw ire after suggesting that folks seeking privacy might not want to look to the Internet to find it. “I think judgment matters,” Schmidt said, appearing on CNBC . “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.” What has really drawn attention to this whole thing is the point of view of Mozilla . It has gotten under Mozilla’s skin so badly the suggestion is even made to go to bing because their privacy policy is better. Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Yikes. maybe this whole Chrome thing is making Mozilla a little more adversarial. “That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy,” Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler said on his personal blog, referring to the CNBC comments. “There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here. Watch the video.” Watch the video? What a great idea! Isn’t it interesting that this whole discussion is brought up on the heels of Google’s widening of the personalization of search results to everyone? In essence, that means that the vast majority of people will be completely unaware of the amount of data that Google is gathering on them anyway. Privacy is for the opt-out crowd only! Ok, Pilgrims, is privacy something that we should expect online or has that gone the way of the dinosaur. If you do expect it, to what level do you expect it? Let us know your private thoughts in this very public forum .

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Google and Privacy: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In case you’ve been . . . I don’t know, asleep for the last two years, you probably realize that the Internet is changing the way people get their news. Newspapers are having a notoriously hard time adapting . But Google, in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post, is trying to change that—and change the way we use news on the Internet (and, from the sounds of it, possibly the Internet altogether). The result is a more dynamic news page called a “ Living Story .” At the top of the page, there’s a short summary of the whole story to date. Below that, they have a timeline of headlines, then all individual stories on a given topic on one page, sorting them in reverse chronological order (or filtered as you choose from the left-hand pane). To indicate individual stories’ importance, the summary of the story is longer or shorter (or omitted). The full text of the story is accessible on the page. The page “remembers” what stories you’ve visited and whether you’ve been there before, and hides or grays out things you’ve already read. And naturally, email and RSS updates are available. Of course, Living Stories only work for stories that . . . you know, “live.” In their video, Google uses the war in Afghanistan page and the health care reform page as examples—stories that have some new related headline every day. (Note that both the Post and the Times each have a page for each story, so there are two health care reform living stories, etc.) The left-hand navigation allows you to filter stories by location/subtopic (preselected), story/data type, importance and chronological order. Although I do like the format, I’m not as impressed as I wanted to be with the implementation. (Probably has to do with the fact that the first coverage I saw led with a quote about how “pages” are a false paradigm for the web and we should be so over them by now.) The reality is that it’s just AJAX. The organization is better for learning about the long-term view of a story. And it’s nice to know when checking up on a familiar story that you won’t reread something accidentally. For day-to-day news, though, unless you only want to track every story on a certain topic, it’s probably not the best way to remain informed about world affairs. What do you think? Are Living Stories a revolution to online news? Will they be the wave of the future?

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Google Changing Online News with “Living Stories”