Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Earlier this week Google announced that they are launching a new browser called Chrome.The browser will be available in 100 countries and is billed by Google as being a competitor to both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser will be cross platform working with Windows, Mac and Linux and is the first software release for Linux that Google has released. The developers at Google who have been working on this new browser started with a blank page - looking at what the guys at Google would ideally like a browser to do, having spent so many hours on the internet.

The Chrome browser is aimed at both making the internet easier for user and also to drive innovation on the internet. Designed to be clean and easy to use it’s focussed more on the experience of browsing the web. Their tabbed browsing will run each tab as an isolated instance meaning that if a website crashes the browser won’t shut down as with IE and Firefox, just that one tab. As a result of their user focus Google are aiming to make their browsing experience much faster and user-friendly.

After a period of beta testing Google is rolling out AdSense for Mobile in 13 countries: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan. Much like AdSense on the desktop, it’s aimed at publishers and site owners and intended to extend Google ad penetration farther into the mobile Internet.

The idea here is that available monetization will encourage mobile friendly site development. There are a number of other mobile ad networks (with more on the way), including Third Screen Media (owned by AOL), Medio’s MobileNow network, Yahoo Mobile Ad Network, Ad Mob, Enpocket (bought today by Nokia), among a few others.

Could your website be easily transferred to a mobile friendly format, would it justify the cost?

In a revamp of its industry-leading Internet search engine, Google Inc. today introduced a “universal search” application that blends video, images, news, books, and local search results.

People searching for “I Have A Dream,” for example, will not only be able to get information about the Rev. Martin Luther King’s famous civil rights speech, but also view a video clip of the speech and scroll through books about King’s speech on Google’s search pages.

“Let’s face it,” said Marissa Mayer, the Google vice president for search results and user experience, when people type ‘big wheels races’ into Google, they want to see some action… They want so see some crashes.”

The new universal search application, meant to drive more traffic to Google products like its YouTube video clips, is the most radical of several innovations rolled out at a press briefing at the company’s headquarters.

Google, confirming reports it had been testing television ad sales, is announcing today it will expand its efforts in the USA with an “automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads.”Agencies can upload ads to Google’s system, and then bid auction-style on where the ads will be placed, with different networks, time windows, regions and other categories as options. Google then reports back an aggregate number of interactions and any information about ads being skipped.

Where to next for the media monolith?

As we all learned last week, Google’s efforts to strike content deals with the major media companies, on behalf of their YouTube division, seems to have hit a wall. Viacom pulled all their video clips, NBC accused them of “Mafioso” negotiating tactics, CBS backed off at the 11th hour of deal talks, while Fox and NBC continued to push their vision of launching a big media-backed YouTube competitor.

All such setbacks notwithstanding, it’s still pretty safe to predict that it’s just a matter of time before one of the big media brands caves in and strikes a ground-breaking deal with Google. And maybe not too much longer before Google starts buying programming directly itself.

At the center of such a forthcoming deal will be, of course, money. Specifically, the minimum amount of dollars that Google will guarantee the media company for every year of the deal term. Rumors are that they offered the old media giants as much as $500 million of guaranteed revenues per year, but it wasn’t enough.

By now most people know about Google Adwords, and to a lesser extent Yahoo’s own Contextual Ad service they purchased off Overture.

The problem at the moment is many niches are beginning to show major saturation in contextual advertising. While this is great for the online advertising economy in general, lack of competition is causing price hikes, pushing many of the smaller operators out of the game.

Quigo offers its advertisers the ability to choose which sites their ads are displayed on.

Not all websites are run equally and a top tier site with hundreds of thousands of visitors might be more appropriate than a small blog website depending on the product or service offered.

The key though is choice, which is very important when you want to fine tune your results even more than Google and Yahoo allow, particularly when dealing with gargantuan budgets from the big players.

This two page Google Cheat Sheet lists all Google services and tools as well as background information. The Cheat Sheet offers a great reference to grasp of basic to advance Google query building concepts and ideas.

Download it here (PDF file)

The two pages of Google Cheat Sheets cover:-

• A list of all Google domains
• Company information
  
  • Founded Date
  • Key People
  • Revenue
  • Employees
  • Contact Address
  • Contact Phone & Fax
• PageRank
  
  • Googlebot 2.1 Addresses
  • List of sites with PageRank 10
  • PageRank formula
• Google Form Elements
• Google Services
• Query structure to access directory listings of:-
  
  • Music files
  • Movie files
• List of basic Google Calculator operators
• List of advanced Google Search operators
• List of Google Investments
• List of fun Google services and tools
• List of 15 official Google Blogs
• Google Calculator examples

I read an article today talking about Google finally offering a version of their many office productivity tools as a paid service to businesses.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_07/b4021070.htm

People have been speculating about this sort of stuff for a while now, and since most of us have experienced web applications ourselves we have no doubt this is the direct a lot of productivity tools will go.

Microsoft has also produced a similar product called Office Live.

I think all of these types of products are going to move to online subscription based models in the near future; and this could finally lead to the death of upgrade software and licensing.

One thing Microsoft can certainly do with is some healthy competition on the Office front. I know most people find that their software is over complicated and bulky.

Here is an interesting insight into what Google’s plans are for Australia.

http://www.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/content/2006/s1797620.htm

It’s also interesting that business analysts may not see Google in the same way that Google sees itself.

A research note by CitiGroup analyst suggests that Google will become the highest-trafficked site on the planet a year from now. Mark Mahaney based his advice to the investors on September 2006 data from ComScore showing Yahoo! receiving 129,724,000 million unique visitors over that month and Google ranking 4th with 107,365,000 unique visitors. So “Mahaney notes its unique visitors are up 22% from last year, by far the biggest gainer among the Web sites. Using the present growth rates of the top 20 Web properties as a guide, Mahaney says Google will become the top Internet destination in late 2007.” For the record, on the European continent Google sites are already ranked at #1, ahead of Microsoft/MSN, Yahoo! and eBay.