Google on for a makeover?

Recently, Google announced officially that they are no more getting any profits from Youtube, along with a few other ventures like Google Checkout, Print Ads etc. To stress on the severity of the situation, Google even went on to say that Youtube might well prove to be a significant risk for the search ads giant. That is understandable, considering the amount of bandwidth and storage Youtube eats up every hour. But, what would Google do now? Since the incubation about 10 years ago, Google has been on a upward run, acquiring anything interesting and adding the Google brand to it. This included the likes of Blogspot, Picasa, Feedburner and ofcourse Youtube, which was bought for a whopping 1.65$ Billion. But, has the Google's downslide started? Is history repeating, as it happened the software giant Microsoft a few years ago?
For instance, I agree there were trivial improvements to youtube in the past few months, but has there been any major innovation? What happened to the iGoogle? Though it was a big hit overnight, soon Yahoo! and Live where able to kick butt, at least to some extent. What about orkut? Facebook is now in news everyday, but we seldom hear about orkut. Has the buying spree of Google cost them dearly?
Two weeks back, Google acquired Omnisio, a video annotation company for reviving Youtube. But still, for the first time, Google seems desperate and upset over Youtube, as this statement from Google proves,"[The] anticipated benefit of may of our acquisitions may not materialize. For example, we have yet to realize significant revenue benefits from our acquisitions of dMarc Broadcasting (Audio Ads) and YouTube."
Google is the undisputed king of internet, at least as on date. But, how many days more? I believe they have already entered the red zone, and you might well get to see some real makeovers to keep them in game. Rather than taking over anything that comes their way, Google might try to make the existing businesses profitable.
Recently an ad by Google on newspaper read,
"We are very much like a startup company, and think in the same way. So if you are innovative..." it goes on. I think, Google has to pull up their socks, if they don't want to end up like a startup company.
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D conference, 6th edition of digital Pandora's box!

All things Digital is the yearly conference of the tech world, hosted by Wall Street Journal and has been going on since 2003. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher shoot questions mercilessly at the opponent, be it the richest man on earth, Bill Gates, or his most innovative counterpart Steve Jobs.
The D6 or the 6th edition, was held from 26th to 29th of May and was eagerly watched over by the Geeks. It was really a Pandora’s box which opened Microsoft's ideas for Windows 7, Yahoo's own Jerry Yang's confessions, Facebook's Toddler CEO Mark Zuckerberg's amateurish answers. You have all that. It a complete, 3 day long soap for techies.
Last 3 days I was doing no work in office, but following the whole D thing. And thanks to the D6 website, I could get nice video highlights, and transcripts of the happenings. I wish I were in California rather than in some remote town in India, so that I could also get to see these things live.

Nevertheless, the 6th edition was pretty interesting to watch, it kept up with its tradition. Remember the Bill Gates- Steve Jobs sharing the podium in last year’s version? That is the best thing about the D. There are no cuts, no second takes, no cover ups. The sharp tongues of Kara and Walt battle with the big corporate legends, and even audience get their chance. It foams out so much information.

I will brief some of the highlights of this year, before I write separate blogs for those which I feel are very much interesting and useful.

First and foremost, as always the Microsoft, wherever they go they pull crowd. This time it was Bill Gates along with his long term partner and CEO Steve Ballmer, and discussed about the Yahoo! deal, the Vista debacle, and more interestingly the first sneak peaks on Windows 7.

Then you had Jerry Yang along with Yahoo! President Sue Decker almost struggling to put up a smiling face and say Yahoo! is not dead! Yahoo! is rising.

Also, the sandal CEO, Mark Zuckerberg at last shed his habit of wearing sandals for public meets! No that is not the big news, he along with Sheryl Sandberg opened up about what is actually Facebook, “Share, share, share, share…” he kept on saying this so many times. It was clear, though he is too good a techie, not yet trained completely for the public speech. And between share, he also said, Facebook is not interested in Microsoft deal or an IPO right now.

We had Melinda Gates talking about pulling Bill out of Microsoft for more efforts on philanthropy, and their plans on how to make the world a better place.

Apart from that there were many others like Rupert Murdoch talking about news in general and news.com in particular. Amazon.com’s own Jeff Bezos and much many. But I will end this blog with some interesting quotes.

“No product we have shipped including Windows 95 has given 100% of what i wanted in that product…” Bill Gates, when asked whether Vista was able to achieve what it expected to.

"I do think I'm the best person to run Yahoo. Not only because I bleed purple, and bleed Yahoo..." Jerry Yang, when attacked asking whether he should actually remain Yahoo's head.

"Eric (Schmidth) and Larry (Page) came over to my apartment, but I didn't have enough furniture, so Eric sat on the floor.." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when asked about his relationship with Google.

"we have a culture that is very much about "we need to do better". Vista has given us more opportunities to exercise the culture than some other products we have shipped." Bill Gates, again on the Vista failure.

"Kara:Do you use MySpace? Murdoch: No. Kara: Facebook? Murdoch shakes head: No", media veteran, and news Corp. head Rupert Murdoch.

That will all in this coverage I suppose, I will come back again with the individual events, which I found interesting, till then here is link for you to feed upon.
All things Digital website.

Also check out my tech blog with a sense of sattire and humor, sillytech.
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Digsby, the new IM cloud.

People might have heard about twitter, it is a place where people can maintain an online, public diary. People could write whatever they want directly from the twitter portal or even through various IMs by adding twitter ID as buddy and sending them IMs. The service is really unique (and wierd, some may think), but nevertheless very popular. It even won the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi)( aka "spring break for geeks.") awards. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging.
Now, after creating a new realm in the web, they are with their new product, Digsby ( I could not get a meaning for this word, though). Digsby is an integrated IM client which can handle multiple protocols like Yahoo!, MSN, Gmail, AOL etc. But, that doesnt end there, it can handle e-mails and more amazingly the social networking accounts like MySpace, Facebook too. That might give it an edge over the existing Trillian, Miranda etc. And the interface too looks better.
At first, even I thought Digsby is just another Trillian. But, it didn’t take me much to realize I am wrong. The installation was a breeze( you have binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac, I tried Windows). Then the configuration, you can add your accounts to it, IM accounts, e-mail accounts, and Social Networking accounts( only MySpace and Facebook for now, but they promise for more in future). Once this is done, the main window is divided into panes to show your chat buddies, mails and social links. You can even configure their placement. It looks really organized. Another feature is you can group your buddies, that is, if you have a same buddy in MSN, Gtalk and Yahoo!, you can create a single nickname for that and it would be compact. Whenever you run your mouse over a buddy name in the list, it will automatically show his profile details, fetched from the internet. Another good thing about Digsby is that it has dozens of nice and appealing themes for every taste. I spent over a night choosing my style. The information and alerts come up as nice little pop-ups on desktop. Digsby also lets you create your own widgets.
In the downside, there is not support for Orkut and other social networking accounts. And in the IM side, the buddy images does not come up correctly, even if they have an avatar of icon, set, Digsby tends to ignore it and show the default icon. But things will change in the near future. Atleast, the beta tag is still hanging around Digsby’s neck. So, hope you enjoy the experience with purple colored, egg shapped, capped buddy.
Digsby Home.
Twitter Home.

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