LUX.ET.UMBRA

Image via CrunchBase

I’m really disappointed. So far, I’ve been tracking the entire deal for all sorts of cities on and off for the past week on “Google’s Infrastructure for Communities” venture. Amusingly, I had actually applied for the city of Winston-Salem long before Greensboro even knew about this venture. And with all of the cities, including Greensboro, no one has once bothered to mention that this product is specifically last mile driven. It’s to the homes of consumers. That’s right, it’s basically the same as Wilson’s Greenlight project.

FTTH – (fiber to the home).

It’s documented right there in the RFI, but everyone is trying this gimmick and that gimmick to try to get Google to come. Why not analyze what their business model has been and will continue to be? Why not actually look and see whether or not they have actually purchased dark fiber around your area? That’s information that is vital and crucial to your cause. Those that have dark fiber that has been purchased close to your locale will probably stand a better chance of becoming the venture’s pet project.

What journalists need to focus on, is not whether or not businesses or research institutions have access to high speed Internet. That’s just entirely irrelevant. So what if Google puts in FTTH. That would not effect a school, nor a law firm, or even a medical facility. What people need to find out is what sort of applications could be coming across a high speed connection to your home. Would you discontinue your cable service? Would you go with fiber based HDTV? What if Google was your provider and controlled the line and access points? Why would this be good for what they do?

I think there are many people that are not asking the right questions. Google doesn’t ever do anything for free (yes, Google does mine your Gmail. It’s in your terms of service). And it’s not like the Dell fiasco with the manufacturing plant since any job creation would be very much infrastructure related. Would your city become an instant techburg? Of course. But at what price, and do you have what it takes to do this?

Personally? I think they’re after the television content. Youtube is perhaps only the first step in the long line of things, but having been a shareholder and analyzed their corporation for a number of years, I can say that I can see many ways that they could monetize the information gathered by using similar techniques as their current search but applied in the high-definition medium.

Google is a great company and I would love for them to become a major corporate player in the Triad. But so far, what I’ve seen has been more of the whole … who can throw the biggest party and have the best food for when Google comes. Sorry, Topeka. Just. Not. Impressed. And that just doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes right down to it.

Tags: Google, Internet, Local, Observation, Opinion by darkmoon
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Google came out with their social network tool called Google Buzz just a day or so ago.

While it’s actually a fascinating tool and definitely could give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money, it really is a little too noisy for me. Mainly because of the integration with Gmail. When I logged in, I expect to see my emails since I have to respond to many of them and they’re usually something important even though they’re of personal nature. But with Buzz, it’s really just a noise floor to keep up with what’s going on in the world. I usually have another tab open for those types of things so I don’t have to pay attention to them unless I want to pay attention.

In any case, this isn’t a well-known thing so to turn off Google Buzz:

• Scroll to the bottom of the Gmail screen
• Click “turn off buzz” in the footer.

And that’s it. It’s pretty easy and straight forward, although you’d never think to do it in the footer since there’s a Settings tab for your account. In any case, there have been some other friends that have been seeking this information since it got too noisy in their lives too so obviously it’s not just a personal occurrence. Either way, if you’re looking to turn off Buzz, there ya go.

Tags: Google, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I have to say that with my first couple days with the Droid, I’ve noticed some things that no one else has really bothered to mention. First, if anyone think that this is a contender for the iPhone, I would say that Apple really has some competition. This is definitely the first phone that I’ve touched that overall has a better feel and the apps actually are close enough to really give Jobs some heartburn.

Likes
Very smooth. If you have it linked to your wifi at home, when the signal disappears, it actually switches off to 3G immediately. No fuss, no muss. The interface moves very well. It does lag sometimes if you don’t have the right apps to shut down the apps that you quit from (why you can’t quit from an app is another annoyance that Google has to fix).

I love the notifications. I mean, that’s one thing that iPhone doesn’t do well, and notifications here are out of the way and are there when you want to look at them.

Maps integration and voice dial? Awesome. The entire Car Mobile feature is sweet and I think Garmin itself might have a contender on its hands. I’ll have to test it out more to find out.

The multimedia station sync is great. Immediately, my phone also became my alarm clock. Will have to note to self not to chuck alarm clock across the room…. not that I do that anyways, but still.

Vibrate function is super powerful. Now this might be somewhat annoying and I sorta wish people would make it so that you could control the level of vibrate sometimes, but a powerful vibrate always helps when you’re in a loud place and your phone goes off. There’s nothing more annoying than waiting for a call and missing it because you didn’t feel the vibrate feature. Entirely useless then, isn’t it?

OpenGL support. Android is basically a flavor of linux (don’t believe me? kernel is 2.6.9….), so we shouldn’t be surprised here but that makes 3D gaming and animation completely possible and with the smaller resolutions, you can guarantee some interesting gaming coming your way.

I’m not fond of keyboards, but the hardware keyboard is actually a nice one and compared to my Nokia n810 Wimax, it feels pretty good. The on-screen one could use a little work when it’s trying to detect what you’re trying to type so it corrects it after learning what letters you hit off in portrait mode.

Android Market is awesome. It might be a little more simple compared to the iTunes store, but when people complain about how there’s just not enough apps? From one geek to another, I’m going to say that there’s plenty out there. Plenty. Sometimes I wish open source apps were this easy to find.

Forget the in-the-box browser. Get Dolphin. Know how iPhone users are all talking about how they can zoom and such? Dolphin can do that. Now if only Google put it in all of their apps like Google Maps and such.

Dislikes
I don’t like the fact that BT headsets don’t have voice dialing. This is a problem of Google’s Android OS, and not the phone itself. Very annoying considering it’s a phone built by Motorola, and every past Motorola phone actually had BT voice dialing. This should have been brought up during testing by product development on Motorola’s side since it’s a feature they’ve had since… well, forever.

Don’t like the fact that you can’t quit from an app. Some apps might need to be persistent but out of the box, there are many that don’t have to run in the background. Very annoying out of the box. Fortunately, I went and grabbed Task Manager, and life is good again.

I also don’t like the fact that you can’t group contacts together from different sources. While an auto-merge might be a little crazy, the fact that you can sync your Facebook contact information with your Google accounts means that you’ll get a lot of duplication. Merging the two in a pseudo-group format would make life a lot easier and provide profile shots for those that you didn’t have profile pictures. Personally, I think the Android is missing out here but then again, somehow I doubt the iPhone can do it too (can anyone tell me one way or another? ).

Camera auto-focus. What? Seriously, the time it takes to auto-focus for certain apps, I’d rather do a manual focus feature. Oh wait, you can’t. But seriously now, this sounds like a fix that can be done via firmware.

In portrait mode, the on-screen keyboard is pretty blech. If you have big hands, it’s hard to type with it on there. Fortunately for landscape mode, eh?

Synopsis
It’s really a blanket bomb of my thoughts, but I really don’t see any reasoning why you can’t send text messages and surf and such while on a call like the iPhone commercial. Having worked in the telecommunications industry for over a decade on the infrastructure side, there’s not really any reason that it couldn’t happen unless the phone itself occupies resources that otherwise can’t be used for a call when on data, or vice versa. Of course, if people wanted to do it, it could still be done by using the same techniques as PTT on CDMA. Think about it.

I still haven’t seen any driving or flying games that require the accelerometer for turning that I’ve seen on the iPhone. But based on the sensitivity of Google Sky, I would say that the Droid can totally pick up the same type of gaming.

Battery life seems a bit lacking, but nothing out of the ordinary with a smartphone. Most of your battery goes to the radio and the LCD in a smartphone anyways. Some power-save features might be nice.

If you get down to the Verizon over AT&T for service? I’d agree completely on voice and data. There’s just no question when you compare the two networks. Part of the reason why I haven’t bothered with an iPhone.

With Google’s coffers, I think the Droid and Android phones in general have a really good shot at taking on the number one smartphone maker. There are a few things that I would start pushing and remind Google that when you’re gunning for the number one spot in mobile devices, your product can’t be in beta. Some of the dislikes that I mentioned above are staples of the mobile industry and need to be patched for all current and future phones. If you just let it be, people won’t want to use your product. Just as RF is finicky, domestic mobile users are finicky. And you just can’t rely on that type of situation when so many vendors are looking to your OS to end the slaughtering.

Tags: Apple, Cellular, Google, Linux, Observation, Opinion, Wireless by darkmoon
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Annoyingly, email from Google Apps will fail to some recipients if you do not set up the SPF (Send Policy Framework) record for your domain. And while Google Apps tells you how to do it with a TXT record, the way GoDaddy does it is a little bit different:

• Go to Total DNS Control Panel.
  
• Under the TXT section: click Add SPF Record.
  
• Select An ISP or other mail provider: click OK.
  
• Select Outsourced tab: put “aspmx.googlemail.com” (no quotes) in the field and click OK.
  
• Click OK again when GoDaddy sets up a SPF record.

And then you can wait a little bit for that to propagate to all of the DNS servers. Once that’s done? You’ll have your SPF Record set.

Tags: Email, Google, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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I have to say that from a technical perspective, I’m pretty disappointed with Microsoft’s Bing.com. A lot of press came out when Microsoft released Bing, and to tell you the truth, the fact that it held even number two for a day was pretty amusing. Mainly because most people didn’t know what it was.

I for one, was actually curious when I saw the tv advertisements and it had a bunch of pretty high contrast pictures. Bing.com? What the heck is that? Decision engine? You realize later on that the entire decision engine thing is sort of a joke. I’m not sure which marketing person came up with that, but Caterina Fake’s Hunch, is way more of a decision engine than Bing ever was. But with all of the imagery, I had thought that Bing finally hit on something that people have been waiting for. Image search on the next level.

Let’s not forget that Google had acquired Riya years back and there was a significant amount of press about that cool image searching. Basically, the thought is that you can give an image and the engine would be able to detect where faces were and perhaps next steps were to detect similarities in facial recognition and say… search out all of my pictures on the web. Now, image processing at this level isn’t something that’s revolutionary but in an indexed web form, it is. According to my father, whom I would say is an expert at image processing, it’s not about whether or not it can be done as much as the processing that comes with it. It takes a lot of power to determine if images are related and if there are matches in facial structures. That’s what I had thought Microsoft had cracked with Bing since that definitely would propel it into another arena, especially with its research into Photosynth.

Unfortunately, like many others, it was a real disappointment. It seemed that Bing.com was just another search and it still didn’t pull as accurately as Google does. While there are some that are touting the greatness of Bing’s moves in search and the gradual growth of market share, I frankly don’t see it. If the results were better or they had focused on something like images, I would definitely consider a switch. Call me a cynic, but I really don’t understand how seeing a picture of the Sydney Opera House today is really going to help me search for anything… for example: web based accounting startups.

Tags: Google, Internet, Microsoft, Observation, Opinion, Technology by darkmoon
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Okay. This is getting rather annoying when one hand doesn’t talk to the other hand.
It’s amazing how much email (if you are both a Google affiliate and you run it through either your personal email, or Google Apps) that isn’t white listed by Google itself. One of my favorite ones is when the spam filters or phishing filters catch the affiliate emails that were coming from Doubleclick.com previously and now the ones that actually come from Google itself but are not being put into a global whitelist of some sort.
You would think that being part of the same corporation but in different divisions, that this would have already shown up somewhere as a yellow flag. But it’s been over a year since the acquisition and months it seems that I’ve seen this issue happening and it’s still not resolved.
So what’s the deal? Someone in Google Affiliates just not use Gmail for their email? Perhaps they have an internal filter that lets things through. Either way, it’s interesting to note that the rest of us that actually do use Google products are running into this workable but slightly annoying issue.
So would someone at the big G at least have the affiliate emails whitelisted? It would be much appreciated.

Tags: Google, Observation by darkmoon
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Image via Wikipedia

If you just got an email from Google, you probably already know about this, but if not, here’s the email in its entirety below. Basically what it says is that Google is going to start targeting advertisements via interest based technology through DoubleClick. This really isn’t anything special except that there’s going to be another cookie and as a publisher, you have to update your privacy policy by April 8th, 2009.
In going through the documentation, I found that most of it was pretty much your usual privacy policy type things. Nothing terribly fancy. You can get away with just adding three bullet points that are explained in the links in the email.
Obviously, if you don’t actually use Adsense, then you won’t have to worry about these changes. If you do though and you don’t have a privacy policy that abides by the Adsense rules, Google basically has the right to pull the plug on your Adsense account. So don’t take that chance.
Email content is below:

Hi,
We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.
Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.
As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.
For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.
We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Tags: Google, Internet by darkmoon
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Google has released a new part of iGoogle that basically allows you to customize your own search results. These results are then stored inside your Google account and brought up later on on those particular search terms.
There are two things going on here outside of the obvious with SearchWiki. If you discount the fact that it basically customizes your search, and you’re not able to turn it off, there’s one of two things going on. First, it gives Google an advantage of human filtering. While it’s not going to effect the current public searches at this moment, there’s nothing that says that it wouldn’t later on. If you think about it, the human filtering machine is the last step before algorithmic. You can only get so far with mathematics these days, and by context, human beings can filter spam or irrelevant search results much better than a computer after the bulk of the work is done. It’s what another company that we all know should have done with their tool in my opinion.
The second that this does, is that it gives creates a interactive search experience. I know that’s not something that most people care about nor is it something that is particularly useful for everyone. But it does give you an idea from an informational standpoint on how people try to game the system.
Truthfully, if these results ever show up in the actual searches or have some sort of weight, I wouldn’t be surprised. It also would give an opportunity for people to game the system just as SEO has become such a large part of the Internet market. From a business perspective, there are many good things that can come of this particular tool for Google.
Now if only, you could turn it off…

Tags: Google, Observation, Opinion by darkmoon
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Don’t let the ISPs fool ya. Today, they’re in a Senate hearing trying to defend themselves about privacy and ISPs. And they’re pointing their finger at Google.
From a technology standpoint, I practically spit out my coffee when I read this. Now, most laypeople do not know that there is a big difference between Google and the ISPs. If you do an analogy in the automotive industry, ISPs are the roads leading from place to place, while Google is merely a vehicle. So as a consumer, you have the choice of vehicles, but you don’t have a choice in what road you pick, since it’s the infrastructure that the vehicle travels upon. So if the ISPs (people behind the roads) decide to toll you, or inspect the contents in your vehicle? Then you have to let them or else you can’t use the infrastructure. There’s no choice in the matter. With choosing Google however, you are actually selecting the vehicle knowingly letting Google look at your contents. You could just as likely choose Yahoo, MSN, or a number of other “vehicles” for your travels.
So basically, the choice is between voluntary, and involuntary access to data. And the ISPs are comparing themselves to Google? If the Senate hearing committee buys into this, then you know that there’s something seriously wrong with politicians (or they’ve never learned how infrastructure works).
What really got me is this quote on AT&T’s DPI (deep packet inspection) technology. Basically, they have a way to inspect packets and their contents while they’re running through their routers. Nothing super fancy pants, hackers have been doing this for years, but it is hardware.

AT&T says it is not doing anything yet with so-called Deep Packet Inspection technology, which lets routers look beyond basic routing information on internet packets to look more closely at what kind of information is being sent, how, and even the content of the packet.

Now remember something here. AT&T was also the one that allowed the NSA to put in a totally separate room in their main switching center that would fork off all the data going in and out and then pushed really hard to gain retroactive immunity. The SAME company is now telling the Senate that they’re not going to be invading privacy with this technology? Come on.
So sorry, AT&T. But in my opinion, you’ve lost all credibility when you chose to push for immunity instead of facing the consequences of it. You don’t place yourself for consumer rights, nor does it seem like you’d abide by privacy matters anyways. Call it historical precedence. And to wipe the slate clean and start over, is going to take a lot more work than just your word that you won’t be using the DPI technology.
As for the comparison with Google? Seriously. ISPs that are trying to make that relationship just made my day.

Tags: Business, Google, Internet, Observation, Opinion by darkmoon
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I love Google Browser Sync. In fact, I run this for every Firefox instance on any system that I own. There’s just something about using your Gmail to store the current pages/tabs that you’re reading and the ability to restore when the browser crashes that makes it one of those absolutely needed plugins. It also stores all of your history and bookmarks, browser passwords, and persistent cookies. Basically everything.
But there are a few things that drive me nuts still. One is that you can’t initiate a manual sync. There’s no way to actually just tell it to sync up to Google so that you know that there is a copy. There was a number of times where the automated sync didn’t kick in and I had to restore an older copy. Bleh.
But that’s not all. It’d also be nice to store different versions of backup. There also has been a number of times where Firefox crashed on restoring the pages. Well, since Browser Sync decided to kick in and sync up the “non-opened” pages, basically lost the tabs.
This plugin just has a little ways to go to be fully mature but it’s just a smidgeon off. Until then, I’ll just keep using it and getting annoyed I suppose. Probably nothing stopping me from tearing up Google’s extension and making it better, but you’d think that they’d take the initiative. Ah well. Can’t have everything your way, I suppose. It’s not like Google is Burger King.

Tags: Google, Internet by darkmoon
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