Google Fiber – Is it attractive? – An analysis

Google yesterday announced its Google Fiber project for high speed internet connectivity making an entry into the post decade-old broadband era.  Google has been spreading up its wings from being a mere search company. It wants to enter every segment of business which directly impact the end customers. Some say Google is still a search company since majority of the revenues still come from ads in search business, some say it is more Android focused these days, few says that Google has emerged into a hardware company after the launch of its own hardware in Nexus Q and fighting hard to convince netizens that it would also emerge as a Social Media company with tight integration of Google Plus in every aspects of its business.

I am sure Google takes a tough look at the business scenarios before making an entry move to these segments and try hard to achieve a flag bearer in ever segment of business it operates.

The latest such move is the Google Fiber project it announced in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Google Fiber is supposed to provide 1Gbps of bandwidth as Google promised.

Here are some of the interesting points to note about:

1. Users have to pre-register in Google Fiber website for registering for a connection. The charge is 10$. This is an interesting stuff as Google wants to earn in every possible way.

2. If you are registered in Google Fiber website, it does not mean that you will get the fiber installed to your home.  Google Fiber introduced a concept called “Fiberhood” where you convince your neighbors to register for Google Fiber. Google selects the area from where most number of registrations come from.  Well, going by Google brand name, I am sure people will sign up for this (and does not really mind for the 10$ registration fee). Based on a recent study, it is determined that it costs around 650$ to lay a cable to your home. This puts a real hole in the OPEX of the ISP’s. With the Fiberhood, Google hopes  to really cut down this cost to a larger extent.

3. Google has done with laying the fiber throughout the Kansas city.  Google says that it has sought help from utilities dept to use the power poles for the fiiber and AT&T for laying the cable. Brilliant move, but strange. Why should AT&T help Google in this as the product being launched by Google is a tough competitor for AT&T. Leave me a comment if anyone knows what exactly is AT&T’s involvement in this project. Why it should help Google in the first place?

4. The pricing plans are not really competitive to encourage people to move to Google fiber. However you would get better speeds for the same rate that you are currently paying for lesser bandwidth.

5.  For folks who were thinking that Nexus Q is the only hardware device made directly from Google stable, just to let you know that Google also has a DVR device to its credit.

Leave me a comment if you have any thoughts / analysis / comments.

Have a great weekend !

War in the Cloud !

The past one month has seen major news updates from the cloud storage companies – Microsoft, Dropbox, Google. Microsoft has revamped its Skydrive to compete with Dropbox and the likes. In the meantime, Dropbox has been giving major updates to its Cloud storage service. I do like the simplicity of the Dropbox service and have been using it for few months now. Its pretty cool to share photos and pretty much happy with the extra MB’s that i get when any of my invited friends install Dropbox.

Google recently announced Google Drive ( a “long awaited one” though !) for storing contents online and can be accessed from anytime, anywhere and from any device. With the boom in Android community at un-imaginable numbers everyday, Google has a very good chance to be a  front runner in the Cloud Storage race. People who have been using Android version 2.2 and above would have noticed an automatic task running in the background which would automatically upload the photos taken using the mobile phone to its Google+ photos. I would say that was a first step by Google in mobilizing its android platform to pull users into the cloud. For all those who are praising about Apple could, go and check your Google Play Dashboard which pretty much has the data of your Android device in terms of the installed apps etc.

Google drive has an obvious advantages of the branding when compared to the other services esp Dropbox. Dropbox which has been the darling of the cloud storage is facing heat since the launch of Google drive.  It’s going to be a tough challenge for Skydrive unless they make the magic with strong integration to Windows desktop and mobile platform. Hopefully Microsoft gets the much required charm since its Windows 7.5 launch in Lumia.

I obviously do not want to comment on iCloud as these guys are pretty much narrow minded only to Apple and do not want like anyone else to build storage solution using IOS.

From a pricing standpoint, Skydrive seems to be better for lesser storage space. Dropbox looses with both Skydrive and Google Drive in the pricing standpoint.

Photo courtesy: www.labnol.org

For all those who look into the legal aspects of Cloud storage, Dropbox and Microsoft would be your choice as Dropbox treats “your file as yours” whereas Google Drive treats “your files as its own”.   While we are  in the mid of hypes with the cloud storage, has anyone cared about the storage of  company confidential information in any of these cloud storage? Well, people using this cloud storage medium knowingly or unknowingly store the confidential information in the cloud which is against your employers policies.

In short, Google Drive has a fair chance of winning the race in the personal computing space, Skydrive has a potential to grow in the enterprise space (If Microsoft pushes it with strong integration to Windows Desktop and mobile platform). It’s high time for Dropbox to think about pricing strategy if it has a long term vision for the company, else it would most likely get acquired by some of the other bigger entrants in the space. Hence there is no clear single winner in the space. It all depends on the medium of usage and its very purpose.

Future of WEB (Real-Time) Communications !

The web browsers which was once acting as a gateway for your PC to access the World Wide Web has been evolving over a period of time. Today with the evolution of cloud based solutions and real time communication, the browsers have become a powerful platform with tons of intelligence being built into it everyday.

WebRTC is an open source project incorporated to build standardized browser API’s for real time communication. The project is supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera.  The project is being standardized by the IETF and W3C.  WebRTC is an extension of the HTML5 standard. Developers who are writing web application can use these API’s for quickly bringing in additional capabilities in their web applications. Since these API’s are standardized, I think it would help reduce cross-platform portability issues for the application.

How is this WebRTC platform going to help in achieving what I cannot do today?

WebRTC is a universal API platform where real time communication implementors can use them. Say for example, today if you want to use Google video chat from within GMail, you would need to first install the plug-in for the browser before starting to use the service. The installable plug-in implementation would be different for different browsers/OS. In simple terms, WebRTC is going to solve this as the browser API support would be inbuilt in the browser.

Does this mean that any browser that supports WebRTC can become a SIP endpoint?

Absolutely yes!

Google Chrome added WebRTC 1.0  support early January this year. In April, Mozilla firebox have also started providing the basic support to its browser. Microsoft has also started incorporated WebRTC components in Internet Explorer, although there were no official release of IE with inbuilt WebRTC yet.

Here is how the browser layers are being split up to differntiate browser specific implementation,  WebRTC API layer(being used by the browser developers to develop API’s) and the Web layer (used by the Web developers developing app for the browser)

[Picture courtesy: WebRTC.org]

Communication app providers such as Vonage, Nimbus etc are already cheering up for the WebRTC support.

Care to look into the webRTC roadmap? Check out here !

Have more queries, checkout the WebRTC FAQ page

WebRTC 1.0 is now available in Chrome Canary. Hoping to get some hands-on over the weekend.

Questions / thoughts – Leave me a comment.

Are patents killing Innovation?

Are patents killing Innovation? It seems “Yes”. It would be very sad to see a day where irrespective of whether a company is innovative or not, if it has tons of patents – then it can win the race. In Q3 2011, Microsoft has issued licensing fee for every android activation as the android platform uses some of the Microsoft patents. In response to this, Google has issued a notice for collecting licensing fee from Microsoft  to use some of its H.264 video patents that Google has got as a result of the planned takeover of Motorola mobility. Interestingly the amount charged by Google does not seem to be a fair price and hence Microsoft appealed to the European Union and the US Department of Justice. The ITC today has done a preliminary ruling for the case filed by Microsoft where Microsoft XBox360 infringes 5 of Motorola mobility patents. The settlement talks would soon be initiated between Microsoft and Google, to prevent banning of import of Xbox360.

It was earlier debated that the chances of Motorola Mobility winning the case was weak because  these patents were covered under Frand.  With Microsoft already fighting with Google on the patents, the news today that Microsoft has sold 650/925 of its AOL patents to Facebook for 550 million dollar came as a shock to me. These 925 patents were bought by Microsoft for 1.1  Billion dollar from AOL. It’s still not clear as to why these 650 patents seemed to be less interesting to Microsoft in less than 2 weeks.  Is it because Microsoft has to buy all 925 patents from AOL to get the patents that it is really interested in? Is Microsoft sure that it is not violating any of these patents, so that it can be sued back by Facebook?

The “who is suing-who?” part of the tech space is growing at a faster pace than ever. Here is a funny picture of “who is suing-who” that  was going around in facebook a month back.

You can add a few more arrows based on the noises that we heard in the last one month. Pretty clear, right?

With all these big companies having tons of cash in their backyard, they may be able to comfortably face the patent challenge. How about the startups which is looking for every penny for their expansion, but getting sued by these biggies? Is it going to hinder the birth of the next Facebook, Google, Microsoft?  Your thoughts?

Mobile Payments – Reloaded !

The retail world has saw quite a lot of new product launches with respect to the mobile payment services in the past few months from Paypal, Google and other few companies.

Paypal recently launched “Paypal Here” where the merchants would be provided with a triangle shaped credit / debit card reader which will fit into the mobile phone headphone jacket. The merchants would need to install the Paypal app for performing transactions with the card reader. Paypal claims that the data between the card reader to the mobile phone’s app will be transmitted in encrypted format and hence there is no way for hackers to hack the data.  What’s significant benefit does this provide to the merchants when compared to the current scenario? Well, perhaps the only thing which i think and what Paypal claims is that you can even take a photo of your credit / debit card to perform the transactions instead of using the card reader. How this is revolutionizing the payment service in the mobile world?   The answer to that is you need not have an NFC enabled smartphone to make payments. But can that be considered as revolutionizing the mobile world? In my opinion – not ! This move by Paypal is a direct attack on SquareUp – which first introduced the mobile payment service using credit /debit card reader. Paypal takes less service charge than SquareUp thereby challenging SquareUp directly on the profits.

Next inline is the Google Wallet from Google where users can do in-store as well as online payments. For in-store payments you need to have a NFC (Near Field Communication)  enabled phone and obviously NFC enabled reader. To me, this looks to be a “cool” way of mobile payment than those used by Paypal (or) Square.  Users do not need to carry their credit / debit cards all the time and hence this is really enriching the mobile experience in the payment space. The service would take sometime to have a stronger footprint since the number of NFC enabled phones are limited as of now.

There is yet another way of mobile payment service being pioneered by a startup called “Seconds” which uses the traditional way of using SMS for payment service. This would help the non-smartphone users to have payment services. I think there has been a talk about using SMS as a payment service for a long time, but do not  know if there way anyone who cared to introduce e-commerce in SMS. The customers have to register their mobile number as well as a credit / debit card to “Seconds“. Customer uses SMS to place an order to a Seconds number of the merchant. Each merchant will get a unique URL for hosting their service in the Seconds platform for performing the transaction.  In my opinion, Seconds looks  like a platform to provide services for “To-Go” restaurants and would be bulky for transactions for any other business – say a retail store and the likes given the amount of work involved in making the transaction.  It’s probably a tough challenge for  Seconds to compete with other biggies in the business.

Content Delivery Network, Transparent Internet Caching – Concerns ?

Earlier this week. I blogged on CDN, TIC (transparent internet caching) and how it works. Today I got a chance to attend a workshop on CDN and got to learn a little more details on CDN.  From now on in the rest of the post, I will refer to companies like Akamai who cache the data from content providers as “TIC providers”.

Few points to be noted in addition to what I have already mentioned earlier (The below comment is based on my understanding about CDN  from quick workshop today. Please feel free to correct me by leaving a comment)

– The  TIC Providers aka- companies like Akamai who manage data center throughout the world do not need to have an agreement with the content provider for caching the static content from the providers. Wow ! That’s a big plus for all these content providers like Youtube, Hulu which will be benefited by the caching being done by companies like Akamai without even being paid a penny.

– The content providers if needed can have an agreement to place their own servers in the data center of the TIC providers. The content providers  can negotiate with the TIC and / or service providers to provide preference for the content from the content provider than with the rest of the traffic. They can specify the quality of service parameters as a part of their agreement. But wouldn’t this violate the whole concept of  Net-neutrality where equal preference should be given to traffic for every content provider? This still seems to be an open ended question for the CDN implemention.

– Assume a case where the content provider does not have its own servers in the data center of the “TIC prvovider”. In this case, if a user tries to access a content , the content will be delivered by the cached content from the TIC data center.  ie.. for example – if we try to access a content from say Google, we might end up with being the content delivered from a non-Google server. Should we start talking about security issues here (or) may be not since the data integrity is supposed to be taken care by the “TIC provider”.

– There is a new standard being developed called CDNi (CDN Interconnect) which is a standard whereby different content providers can interact through standard means for delivering the content.

Google – The Damn Data Miner !!!

Google has recently emerged as a company with strong integration to all its portfolio of products. While this is a good thing to happen for folks who consider Google as the equivalence of the “Web”, there has been lot of controversies in the way Google is trying to integrate its products especially from the security perspective.

Google launched its Google latitude platform in early 2009 and I was a user of Google latitude for few months whereby I shared my location and invited some of my close buddies to share their location. It was kind of cool those days.  With the updates for Google Latitude coming in, the app got bulky and ate lots of CPU cycles. I have disabled the location sharing and stopped using the app since then. Recently I logged into my Google Latitude dashboard and was really *surprised* to see the amount of data mining that Google has done with the data it has collected for few months while I was using the app.

Here is the snapshot of my dashboard. Damn!

There could be many reasons as to why Google would try to read the user behavior by mining the data from user activities across Google products. The most obvious reasons is to provide location based services – through its Google search, places ans other tons of Google services to push its ad based revenues.  Having said that, I am afraid to believe Google’s own philosophy “Don’t be evil“. Whatever we are seeing about the data being captured from user behavior is the most obvious ones. Are we assured that there are no user data been captured through the Android / Chrome OS in the background? Anyone even mind to read the T&C before installation??

On March 28, Google launched Google Activities which is going to be a more integrated dashboard for your behavior on the Google platform across Google products. It would definitely be pretty interesting to review your own activities 🙂 as long as Google does not interpret in any wrong way.

A-GPS is still not accurate in some parts of the World. The data that Google has captured and stored in its dashboard might end up providing you some nonsense location based search results which you would never like to see in your search results (or even in the ad section). Obviously Google cannot be blamed for this, as that data fed to through A-GPS is invalid.  This is what happened to me when i was reviewing the my Latitude dashboard. Luckily, there is an option available to prevent Google to read your behavior.

So your user own judgement to decide if Google should be your master or not!

April 1st – Are the “fooled jokes” a “necessary evil”?

Happy April 1st everyone 🙂 !

There has been tremendous number jokes all over the internet on April 1st from the world of technology. With the increasingly heated competition in the technology landscape, has there been an instance where any such jokes turn into a real breakthrough / innovation to the same or another company? Share your thoughts!

Having said that, just imagine the state when all the Guardian’s and WSJ‘s of the world start sending some pranks on April 1st. A day of confused information flow all around the world? I know that the media world are being bonded by the laws on providing the authentic/genuine information.

Here is a news from Techcrunch about a prank of the Google‘s next (hopeful) successor for the top job. In my opinion, all these blogs (which people keep tab on every second to get the latest developments) should have a sense of responsibility and ensure that they don’t try to defame anyone in the name of silly April jokes. We never know, these big guys are crazy enough to do such things.

Google news which feeds us with some of the hottest news around the world, has obviously picked up another prank about Mitt Rooney (presidential candidate for 2012 from Republican party) in the top of its feed as reported by Masahble. Incidently or unfortunately, the top feed which published the prank is none other than the most respected journal “Forbes”. Can these companies be sued for spreading such false information? Why not ??

Messages like this from Mashable, are really going to be taken seriously (unless you googled about Conan or knew he is a television host 🙂 🙂 ) by the world. It’s good that the content of the news (and the video) sounds really really funny (enjoyed it to the core) and hence people would quickly realize that this is a prank and not real. If the content of the news was written on a little serious note (and the video was cut out the post), poor guy Pete Cashmore would even get more “thumbs down” from the Time 100 list 🙂 🙂

Having said that, I really loved some of the other jokes from Google 🙂 . It doesn’t harm anyone. The worst it can do is to make people think of the jokes and bring out some new cool stuff !

Flipcart’s Flyte – Dancing to Indian e-tunes !

Earlier this month, Flipcart has announced the acquisition of Letsbuy to enrich its portfolio of e-Commerce offerings. Here is yet another news(talks/rumors?) from Flipcart about its plan to integrate music service to the Flipcart website. The music service is being launched under the brand Flyte. Flyte would be a service which is 320 Kbps DRM free (pretty good) and device agnostic.

The music service is being powered by Mime360 which Flipkart acquired November last year. Mime360 was a Mumbai based Digital Media Distribution company. The digital media catalogue is being provided by Chakpak, a Bangalore based startup providing Bollywood media content. This is yet another attempt to grow stronger than Amazon which is slowly entering into the Indian market.

The key factor for the success of Flyte is a “Competitive pricing” of the tracks to reduce piracy. This is a very critical factor for the success of the service in Indian market which is  being dominated by internet piracy.

Here is a Flipkart screenshot (available for a short duration in Flipkart website) revealing the introduction of the music service as reported in Woikr.

Also there are talks that Flipkart is gearing up for the ePub service.

I was really hoping that Google Music would enter into the Indian market, but i guess it is now too late for them and it might be a tough fight against the “to-be-homegrown” Flyte.

Stay tuned for the official news from Flipkart.

Google – From “don’t be evil” to “try to be evil”

Google is requesting Microsoft to pay a hefty fee for use of its 50 H.264 video standard patent which it acquired from Motorola. These patents are used for accessing video services over Wifi. Google is claiming Microsoft to pay 22.50 USD for every Microsoft Windows  laptop less than or equal to 1000 USD. The patent fee doubles for laptop that are 2000 USD worth. This price is ridiculous when compared to the amount that Microsoft currently pays for use of 2000 odd licenses – which is less than 2 cents to 29 companies. Not sure if this fee would be for the video access over Wifi for the Windows mobile and tablets.

Microsoft is ready to pay for a fee that is justifiable and not ready to pay such a huge amount. I think the huge fee is an attempt for the patent fee that Microsoft charges Google for every android phone activation. Microsoft has filed a compliant with the European Commission and the US. Department of Justice seeking investigation the patent fee.

Here is a report from Dave Heiner, Corporate Standards, Microsft. Snippet of the blog post is as below:

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There is an obvious way out of all this. Motorola should honor its promises, and make its standard essential patents available on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. Microsoft is certainly prepared to pay a fair and reasonable price for use of others’ intellectual property. Within just the past few years, Microsoft has entered into more than a thousand patent licenses. We know how it’s done.

</Snip>