2008年12月11日 星期四

YouTube Videos Pull In Serious Money

YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Michael Buckley, YouTube host, at home in Connecticut.


Published: December 10, 2008

Making videos for YouTube — for three years a pastime for millions of Web surfers — is now a way to make a living.

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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Michael Buckley quit his day job in September. He says his online show is “silly,” but it helped pay off credit-card debt.

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One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show “is silly,” he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”

“But on YouTube,” he said, “I’ve had 100 million views. It’s crazy.”

All he needed was a $2,000 Canon camera, a $6 piece of fabric for a backdrop and a pair of work lights from Home Depot. Mr. Buckley is an example of the Internet’s democratizing effect on publishing. Sites like YouTube allow anyone with a high-speed connection to find a fan following, simply by posting material and promoting it online.

Granted, building an audience online takes time. “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime,” Mr. Buckley said — but, at least in some cases, it is paying off.

Mr. Buckley is one of the original members of YouTube’s partner program, which now includes thousands of participants, from basement video makers to big media companies. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, places advertisements within and around the partner videos and splits the revenues with the creators. “We wanted to turn these hobbies into businesses,” said Hunter Walk, a director of product management for the site, who called popular users like Mr. Buckley “unintentional media companies.”

YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.

The program is a partial solution to a nagging problem for YouTube. The site records 10 times the video views as any other video-sharing Web site in the United States, yet it has proven to be hard for Google to profit from, because a vast majority of the videos are posted by anonymous users who may or may not own the copyrights to the content they upload. While YouTube has halted much of the illegal video sharing on the site, it remains wary of placing advertisements against content without explicit permission from the owners. As a result, only about 3 percent of the videos on the site are supported by advertising.

But the company has high hopes for the partner program. Executives liken it to Google AdSense, the technology that revolutionized advertising and made it possible for publishers to place text advertisements next to their content.

“Some of these people are making videos in their spare time,” said Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube. “We felt that if we were able to provide them a true revenue source, they’d be able to hone their skills and create better content.”

In a time of media industry layoffs, the revenue source — and the prospect of a one-person media company — may be especially appealing to users. But video producers like Lisa Donovan, who posts sketch comedy onto YouTube and attracted attention in the fall for parodies of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, do not make it sound easy. “For new users, it’s a lot of work,” Ms. Donovan said. “Everybody’s fighting to be seen online; you have to strategize and market yourself.”

Mr. Buckley, who majored in psychology in college and lives with his husband and four dogs in Connecticut, films his show from home. Each episode of “What the Buck?” is viewed an average of 200,000 times, and the more popular ones have reached up to three million people. He said that writing and recording five minutes’ worth of jokes about Britney Spears’s comeback tour and Miley Cyrus’s dancing abilities is not as easy as it looks. “I’ve really worked hard on honing my presentation and writing skills,” he said.

As his traffic and revenues grew, Mr. Buckley had “so many opportunities online that I couldn’t work anymore.” He quit his job at Live Nation, the music promoter, to focus full-time on the Web show.

There is a symmetry to Mr. Buckley’s story. Some so-called Internet celebrities view YouTube as a stepping stone to television. But Mr. Buckley started on TV and found fame on YouTube. Three months ago, he signed a development deal with HBO, an opportunity that many media aspirants dream about. Still, “I feel YouTube is my home,” he said. “I think the biggest mistake that any of us Internet personalities can make is establish ourselves on the Internet and then abandon it.”

Cory Williams, 27, a YouTube producer in California, agrees. Mr. Williams, known as smpfilms on YouTube, has been dreaming up online videos since 2005, and he said his big break came in September 2007 with a music video parody called “The Mean Kitty Song.” The video, which introduces Mr. Williams’ evil feline companion, has been viewed more than 15 million times. On a recent day, the video included an advertisement from Coca-Cola.

Mr. Williams, who counts about 180,000 subscribers to his videos, said he was earning $17,000 to $20,000 a month via YouTube. Half of the profits come from YouTube’s advertisements, and the other half come from sponsorships and product placements within his videos, a model that he has borrowed from traditional media.

On YouTube, it is evident that established media entities and the up-and-coming users are learning from each other. The amateur users are creating narrative arcs and once-a-week videos, enticing viewers to visit regularly. Some, like Mr. Williams, are also adding product-placement spots to their videos. Meanwhile, brand-name companies are embedding their videos on other sites, taking cues from users about online promotion. Mr. Walk calls it a subtle “cross-pollination” of ideas.

Some of the partners are major media companies; the ones with the most video views include Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, CBS and Warner Brothers. But individual users are now able to compete alongside them. Mr. Buckley, who did not even have high-speed Internet access two years ago, said his YouTube hobby had changed his financial life.

“I didn’t start it to make money,” he said, “but what a lovely surprise.”

2008年12月10日 星期三

Google Zeitgeist


What the Search Engines Have Found Out About All of Us


Published: December 10, 2008

Google has released its map of the national brain and appetites for 2008, and it turns out that many, many people across America have been asking the Internet “what is love?” and “how to kiss.”

And to tighten the focus, Google has also provided a list of search queries made by people sitting at computers in New York City.

It turns out that New Yorkers are looking for something a bit different. On a list of the 10 subjects that posted the greatest increases this year, the country as a whole was looking for Fox News and information about David Cook, the “American Idol” champion.

Neither made the New York list. Then again, the national list did not have 2 of the city’s top 10: Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus architecture school, and the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular underground tunnel in Switzerland that was built to smash protons into each other at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.

No doubt someone out in cyberspace can explain the surge of interest this year in Gropius, who has been dead since 1969 and has only one structure of any note in the city, the former Pan Am building.

The collider is easier to understand. There were worries that the crash of protons would instantly create a black hole, but in good news that was widely overlooked at the time, no hole appeared — or is it disappeared? — on Sept. 10, the day the machine was turned on. Search-engine interest in the collider promptly dropped off, as people pointed their anxieties and inquiries toward “Wall Street.” (The collider is currently on the fritz, as is Wall Street.)

On the surface, these kinds of lists are supposed to reveal what Google calls the zeitgeist of 2008, though it’s not much of a surprise that people were interested in Sarah Palin and Barack Obama. But they also provide hints of the level of personal details that people are now turning over to search engines and related businesses without much awareness.

The lists, said Lt. Col. Greg Conti, a professor of computer science at West Point, “are just major tsunami-type activities, big waves in the online searches.”

Professor Conti, the author of “Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You?” (Addison-Wesley, 2008), contends that Google’s internal tools make it possible to develop detailed pictures of individual interests, not just of masses of teenagers looking for the very latest about Miley Cyrus.

“A complete picture of us as individuals and as companies emerges — political leanings, medical conditions, business acquisitions signaled by job searches,” he said. “It would be very scary if we could play back every search we made. Those can be tied back very precisely to an individual. You can go all the way from individual molecules of water up to the tsunami.”

INFORMATION on the Web looks free, but it is actually swapped for little bits of data that are useful to businesses. Google records Internet protocol addresses that are generated by each computer, cookies permitted by the users, the kind of browser being used, and the operating system of the computer, said Heather Spain, a spokeswoman for Google.

After nine months, Ms. Spain said, Google starts to “anonymise” the data it has collected by deleting the last two digits from the I.P. address. At 18 months, Google removes parts of the cookie number.

“This breaks the link between the search query and the computer it was entered from,” she said. “It’s similar to the way in which credit card companies replace digits with hash marks on receipts to improve their customers’ security.”

Professor Conti said that few people have the slightest idea how much of a trail they leave across the Internet. “People tend to think they’re only leaving footprints on sites that they trust,” he said, but many Web sites contain invisible code, like Google Analytics, that can track users over swaths of the Web.

The lists of popular searches, Ms. Spain said, are the products of inquiries by millions of people and do not threaten anyone’s privacy. The tools Google provides to the public for analyzing searches generally make it possible to look at the inquiries made in a particular state, not by individual cities.

For now, surrendering personal information is the cost for asking questions and getting answers quickly. All of the privacy measures are cumbersome.

“I speak about this at hacker conferences,” Professor Conti said, “and if they say something’s hard to use, believe me, it’s hard. There’s really no solution now — except abstinence. And if you choose not to use online tools, you’re not a member of the 21st century.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 11, 2008
The About New York column on Wednesday, about the most popular search subjects on Google this year, misstated the speed of protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, which made the top 10 list of searches in New York City. The protons travel at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, not at the actual speed of light. And the column, quoting a Google spokeswoman, misstated the timing of a step that Google takes to disguise the identity of its users by deleting parts of their cookies from its logs. It does that after 18 months, not after nine.





December 10, 2008, 5:41 pm

Google Zeitgeist 2008

This year’s Google Zeitgeist, where the Internet giant tracks the most popular search terms, revealed that when it comes to soccer in the United States, the sun has not set on the British (make that the English) Empire.

Globally, the most popular search term was “Sarah Palin,” but in soccer in the United States Google reported that for sports-related terms Manchester United was No. 1, followed by Chelsea and then Chivas USA of Major League Soccer. Rounding out the top five were Barcelona and Arsenal.

According to Webster’s, zeitgeist, a German term, is “the spirit of the age; trend of thought and feeling in a period.”

Among the Big Four American sports, the top search team belonged to the N.F.L. Giants, followed by the N.B.A. Boston Celtics, baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies and the Detroit Red Wings of the N.H.L.

For an English take on the Google list, check out the Web site of the The Daily Telegraph of London.

2008年12月8日 星期一

Even Google Gets Frugal in the Recession

Time

Even Google Gets Frugal in the Recession

Google headquarters.
Justin Sullivan / Getty

It's not just afternoon tea that's falling by the wayside at the famously employee-friendly firm. Although Google hasn't handed out pink slips to any of its 20,000 full-time employees, it has cut about half of its additional 10,000 contract workers in recent months. And, previously one of the biggest recruiters of MBAs on college campuses, Google is eschewing such pricey new hires, although it is still bringing on new engineers.

Most analysts forecast decent growth for Google in 2009. But Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research predicts that the firm will lay off anywhere from 10% to 15% of its employees in 2009 as a result of stagnating revenue. "This is not only for Google. This is for every internet company that has only one revenue source, which is advertising," says Chowdhry. By 2010, he estimates that the company will bring in $14.57 billion, down 4% from an estimated $15.71 billion in 2008. Sanford Bernstein's Lindsay, on the other hand, recently lowered his upbeat forecast for the search giant, but still expects a healthy 19.5% increase in revenue in 2009. (See pictures of "Life in the Googleplex".)

Lindsay's forecast is nowhere as dire as Chowdhry's. But both analysts are reacting to reports that the cost-per-click for internet ads has fallen an estimated 20% this year. Google and other internet advertising companies make much of their money by serving up ads that match keywords that people type into search engines. The rates for those ads are determined by advertisers, who bid for top placement. But advertisers have begun lowering their bids, because they aren't getting the returns (also known as conversion rates) that they expected. In late November, research firm eMarketer lowered the 15% increase in online ad spending for 2009 that it had projected in August to just under 9%.

Google's new CFO, Patrick Pichette, is leading the company's belt tightening. A former executive at Bell Canada, his impact was already evident in the firm's third-quarter results, which it announced in October. Although the company's revenue was slightly lower than analyst estimates, earnings were higher due to cost-cutting measures spearheaded by Pichette, such as decreasing the number of new hires. "Google has certainly gotten religion on expenses, and that is due largely to the new CFO," says Sanford Bernstein's Lindsay.

Now Google needs to focus on its core businesses like search, mail and web-based applications, instead of pouring endless resources into experimental projects that never turn a profit (such as its ill-fated virtual world Lively, which will close at the end of month). "If they could fix their expense management, surely they could fix their product development as well. Google has a very poor product development process," says Lindsay, who criticizes the firm for letting good products languish, while encouraging engineers to tackle newer and more exciting projects instead. For example, its Chrome browser got positive reviews when it was released this summer, but it hasn't been marketed or significantly updated since then.

CEO Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal that he plans to prune the company's offerings in the coming months. It will also try to monetize some previously ad-free products like Google Finance and News. Such efforts may help it weather the economic storm without resorting to layoffs, even if it doesn't bring its stock price any closer to the November 2007 high of $732 per share. (It closed on Wednesday at $279.) And it's still got some $14 billion in cash reserves. So for now, at least, the free lunches are still a go.

Yang's Exit: Did Yahoo!'s Chief Get Played by Google?

Testing Google's 'Drunk E-Mail' Protector

2008年11月21日 星期五

Google Phone Is the New Zune

G1




November 20, 2008, 2:34 pm

Google Phone Is the New Zune

If you get your hands on the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, running Google’s Android operating system, you may be struck with a nagging sense of déjà vu.

T-Mobile G1

It has a comfortably solid heft, and a superior case — it feels like it’s covered with a rubbery skin. It gives the impression of being soft to the touch, but is scuff- and ding-resistant and doesn’t show smudgy fingerprints.

It feels rather like … what is it … oh, yes … the original Zune.

Fitting, because the G1 is arguably the Zune of phones.

Like the Zune, it’s from a late-from-the-gate tech behemoth (Google in this case), and it is up against a well-ensconced, well-thought-out Apple product, the iPhone. By comparison, the G1 interface is somewhat clunky and a tad bug-ridden. With but a few Android apps available online (app shopping works best from the handset, although it’s a laborious process), it has little to challenge the Apple App Store.

But the G1 does has some advantages. There’s the aforementioned resilient case for one. A slider screen reveals a backlit qwerty keyboard in addition to the touch screen, for another.

There is one critical difference. The Google engineers are willing – in fact eager – to hear consumer criticism and respond. If you check the Android forum, you’ll see that engineers are responding to consumer requests along the lines of “Good point, thanks, we are working on that.”

So if the G1 isn’t everything you hoped for out of the box, it seems likely to get better. Good enough to take on the iPhone? We’ll see.

Blogger 功能

Blogger 功能

我們製作了 Blogger,方便您與眾人分享心得,無論是時事、生活大小事或是關心的事情都能分享。 我們也開發了許多功能,盡可能讓寫網誌變得簡單有效。

開始使用 | 更多功能 | 進階功能

開始使用

讓世界聽見你的聲音,就是這麼簡單

使用 Blogger 建立網誌只需幾個步驟。 不用多久,您就可以開始在自己的網誌上張貼文章、相片、影片等資訊。 想貼就貼,完全免費。 看看這篇文章瞭解如何開始使用,或觀賞如何使用 Blogger 建立網誌的影片。

易用介面

請遵循以下幾個基本步驟,以開始張貼文章到網誌。 我們的易用介面可讓您變更字型、以粗體或斜體顯示文字,或調整文字顏色和對齊方式等。 Blogger 會在您每次撰寫新的網誌文章時自動儲存,不會中斷您的撰寫過程。 另外還有容易使用的拼字檢查功能,並且可以方便地對文章新增標籤。此外,Blogger 還有 HTML 編輯器,可以讓您完整自訂文章的外觀。

您的免費網站

您可以在建立網誌時,將其免費保存在 Blog*Spot。 只需要選擇可用的網址就可以了。 如果您之後改變心意想要使用不同的網址,很輕易就可以變更。 Blogger 也納入了自訂網域選項;您可以擁有網域名稱 (例如 example.com),我們仍會在該網域保存您的網誌,讓您享有 Blogger 的所有好用功能。

自訂範本

您有許多範本可以選擇,請從中選擇最適合您網誌需求的範本。此外,您可以使用直覺式的拖放介面自訂您網誌的設計。您還可以新增強力的小工具,例如投影片、使用者意見調查,甚至是 AdSense 廣告。 變更網誌的字型和顏色也相當容易。如果想要更精確地控制您網誌的版面配置,也可以使用 [編輯 HTML] 功能。

將相片和影片新增到您的文章

您可以輕易新增相片到您的網誌文章內,方法是按一下文章編輯器工具列中的圖片圖示。 相片便會保存在您的免費 Picasa 網頁相簿 帳戶中,您可以在此帳戶中訂購沖印相片,並將相片整理成冊。 新增影片到文章的方式同樣很簡單;只要按一下文章編輯器工具列上的膠捲圖示就可以開始。 使用 Blogger 上載的影片會保存在 Google Video

更多功能

讀者意見

Blogger 讓讀者可以輕易在您所有的網誌文章中留下意見,給您有用而及時的意見。 您和讀者也可以選擇透過電子郵件或資訊提供接收意見通知。 若要進一步控制,您可以在網誌上管理意見

新文章通知

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一個簡單的 ID

您可以使用 Google 帳戶 (也可用來存取 Gmail、iGoogle、Orkut 等 ) 登入 Blogger,因此只要記一組使用者名稱和密碼即可。 您網誌的網址也可作為 OpenID,作為您在網頁上的數位識別資訊。 除了已註冊的 Blogger 成員外,您的網誌還可以接受 OpenID 使用者的意見,更方便您的所有讀者發表意見和參與討論。

世界各地的語言

Blogger 目前支援 41 種語言,包括英文、法文、義大利文、德文、西班牙文、荷蘭文、葡萄牙文、中文、日文和韓文。 阿拉伯文、希伯來文和波斯文讀者可以使用由右至左顯示和格式化的 Blogger。 音譯功能適用於 5 種印度語言。

進階功能

行動張貼

Blogger 支援行動版網誌。您只需以 MMS 將文字「REGISTER」傳送到 go@blogger.com,就可以開始使用。您也可以建立秘密的 Mail2Blogger 電子郵件地址,來透過電子郵件在網誌中張貼文章。上述方法都可讓您隨時隨地輕鬆地在網誌張貼文章。

群組網誌

透過 Blogger,您可以輕鬆地建立小組網誌,讓多名 Blogger 在一個一網誌中抒發己見。 您可以選取某些小組成員授予其管理權限,其他人則只能發表文章。 也可以選擇不公開網誌,只有特定的人才能觀看。 如此便可以完整控制您的網誌。

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您可以在與 Blogger 整合的許多第三方應用程式中加以選擇,讓寫網誌變得更加輕鬆。 如果您是開發人員且想要建立自己的完美應用程式,請務必查看 code.blogger.com

更多功能...

我們持續開發 Blogger 的新功能;請查看 Blogger Buzz,以瞭解所有的最新功能和變更。如果想要試用某些試驗性功能,請查看 Blogger 測試區。如需關於 Blogger 功能的詳細資訊,請務必造訪 Blogger 說明網站支援論壇。 如果要觀看其他人的張貼內容,請查看精選網誌Blogger Play。希望您喜歡我們製作的內容。


2008年11月20日 星期四

個人定義搜索功能

我們可能在 google的 my account 了解這

個人定義搜索功能 可為大公司甚或 "心靈的共同體所善用




谷歌引入全新個人定義搜索功能

| |
2008年11月21日10:37
週四開始﹐谷歌(Google Inc.)將向用戶提供搜索結果重新排名和編輯等全新個人定製功能。谷歌希望這能使其搜索引擎更好地發揮作用。

被谷歌稱為SearchWiki的這套工具可以讓任何登錄帳戶的谷歌用戶將感興趣的搜索結果挪到前面﹐刪除無用的結果﹐或通過谷歌標準搜索結果頁面上每項結果徬的標記工具添加個人註釋。

負責搜索產品和用戶體驗的谷歌副總裁梅耶(Marissa Mayer)表示﹐這套工具對重復搜索特別有用。

Jessica E. Vascellaro

2008年11月17日 星期一

Privacy Laws Trip Up Google in Parts of Europe

Privacy Laws Trip Up Google in Parts of Europe


Published: November 17, 2008

When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed the company with open arms. Google’s arrival is still bearing fruit for Zurich: 450 people, 300 of them engineers, work in Google’s seven-story complex in a converted brewery on the outskirts of the placid mountain metropolis.

But almost five years into its expansion into Europe — where it has a headquarters in Dublin, large offices in Zurich and London, and smaller centers in countries like Denmark, Russia and Poland — Google is getting caught in a web of privacy laws that threaten its growth and the positive image it has cultivated as a company dedicated to doing good.

In Switzerland, data protection officials are quietly pressing Google to scrap its plans to introduce Street View, a mapping service that provides a vivid, 360-degree, ground-level photographic panorama from any address, which would violate strict Swiss privacy laws that prohibit the unauthorized use of personal images or property.

In Germany, where Street View is also not available, simply taking photographs for the service violates privacy laws.

“The privacy issue will likely become increasingly important for Google as it continues to offer new services in Europe,” said Dirk Lewandowski, a professor of information sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. “For the moment, most consumers are not aware their data is being used by Google in some fashion. But I think as people become aware of this, there could be protests that Google will have to address.”

The conflict does not end with Street View, which so far in Europe depicts only major cities in France, Spain and Italy.

Data protection advisers to the European Commission in Brussels are questioning Google over how long the company retains user logs — the files containing an individual’s queries typed into Google search fields. A panel of regulators wants Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, to purge the records after six months.

Google says it needs the data for nine months to hone its search engine to reflect the constant changes in contextual meaning caused by news and events. Before October, Google retained the records for 18 months in the European Union. Yahoo keeps its records for 13 months and MSN, Microsoft’s search service, for 18 months. So far, European officials are trying to persuade Google and the others to comply, but they have not ruled out asking the commission to intervene.

Nelson Mattos, a vice president responsible for Google’s 12 engineering centers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said he was confident the company would reach a compromise with the authorities. In an interview in Zurich, Mr. Mattos, a Brazilian who was educated in Germany and spent 15 years at I.B.M. before joining Google in 2007, said Street View would be added in Switzerland and Germany “at some point.” But he declined to say when that might be.

“Google is committed to making sure the data of its users is well protected and not misused,” he said. “Europe has a history of innovation. Where it has not always done as good a job in my opinion is in follow-on innovation, in commercializing the innovation. If you restrict too much how a company like Google can innovate, that will restrict the follow-on benefits in Europe.”

To enhance its profile among European decision makers, Google has bolstered its presence in government centers around Europe. The company now has enough employees to fill three floors of an office building in downtown Brussels. In five years, Google has hired about 3,500 people in Europe for its regional headquarters in Dublin, its larger offices in London and Zurich, and at smaller centers in Krakow, Poland; St. Petersburg, Russia; and Aarhus, Denmark.

Many of the company’s most recent innovations, like elements of its new Chrome Web browser, an analytic tool called Trends and a mass transportation trip planner called Transit, have been conceived or improved in Europe.

The engineering center in Zurich helped speed up the functioning of Video ID, an automated video search service that allows video and music copyright owners to sweep YouTube, the largest online Web video-sharing site, to detect illegal uploads. Google bought YouTube in October 2006.

Introduced a year ago, Video ID is being used by 300 companies, including Lionsgate Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment and the Italian broadcaster RAI. In 90 percent of cases, says Patrick Walker, director of partnerships at YouTube in London, companies choose not to block the illegal footage; instead they run advertisements next to the homegrown uploads, splitting the revenue with YouTube.

“It has basically allowed all types of rights holders for the first time to protect their content on the Web,” Mr. Walker said, “and in most cases, has opened up a whole new way for companies to make money off of their inventories.”

2008年11月16日 星期日

Google looks to users' needs

Google looks to users' needs

Simon Canning | November 17, 2008

THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.

Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organisation that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.

Google looks to users' needs

Google looks to users' needs

Simon Canning | November 17, 2008

THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.

Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organisation that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.

2008年11月11日 星期二

Google Will Add Videoconferencing to Gmail Service

Google Will Add Videoconferencing to Gmail Service (Update2)

By Brian Womack

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., the most popular Internet search engine, is adding videoconferencing features to its Gmail e-mail service to lure users from Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Users can chat for free using Gmail by installing a small add-on program to their browser, Google said today in a statement. Those without a Webcam can use an audio chat option.

Google is trying to capitalize on the growing popularity of videoconferencing, which consumers use to chat with friends and companies rely on to reduce travel costs and connect employees in multiple locations. Microsoft already offers videoconferencing through its Windows Live instant-messaging software. Google's product is different because it works through the Web browser, said Keith Coleman, product manager for Gmail.

``This is one of those things that is very subtle and very simple, but I think can change the way you communicate and the way you work,'' Coleman said in an interview. ``It's very easy to have these very fast, fluid conversations.''

The videoconferencing feature is also available to users of Google Apps, the company's set of online applications, which includes word-processing and spreadsheet software. Companies from Hewlett-Packard Co. to Cisco Systems Inc. also offer corporate videoconferencing products.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, fell $7.32 to $311.46 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have lost 55 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net.

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

谷歌推出流感趨勢跟蹤服務
谷歌週二推出了一項免費的網絡服務﹐
這項服務能早於現有的任何手段顯示出全美各地流感病例是否在增加


Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread


Published: November 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctor.

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Related

Times Topics: Google Inc.

Health Guide: The Flu »

Backstory With The Times's Miguel Helft

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

Some public health experts say the data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths.

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the material people publish on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns. And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced back to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic, so its usefulness is limited.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

2008年11月8日 星期六

Google at 10: Searching Its Own Soul By MIGUEL HELFT

Saturday Interview

Google at 10: Searching Its Own Soul


Published: November 7, 2008

AS Google recently turned 10 years old, some analysts and investors began to say the company was suffering from early signs of maturity. Google’s growth rate, while still brisk, has slowed significantly and is expected to slow more because of the economic slowdown. Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive, said that Google was better positioned than other advertising companies to survive a recession.

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Kimberly White/Reuters

Eric E. Schmidt

Mr. Schmidt, 53, spoke earlier this week from the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters about his plans for managing Google in a downturn, the unraveling of an advertising partnership with Yahoo and his recent public endorsement of Barack Obama. Mr. Schmidt is also a member of Senator Obama’s transition economic advisory board.

Q. Google is working hard to rein in expenses. Is that because Google has matured or because of the economic crisis? And how bad do you think the economy will get?

A. The issue we face with the economic crisis is we don’t know as managers how long the crisis goes. So what is a prudent answer? A prudent answer is to watch hiring. We are hiring but at a slower rate. Last week, we made some number of tens of offers. I suspect that will continue.

The other thing we have done is fairly detailed expense reviews to make sure we are not wasting money.

Q. Given the uncertainty, do you plan for a worst-case situation or something else?

A. It is a judgment call. Google is in a good position over the long term. We have a product that is more measurable, more targetable, and we are the innovator in the space. At some point, people need to sell products, and at some point they realize that the best advertising is measurable advertising, and they conclude that we do that.

Q. Google is known for investing liberally in projects that don’t produce immediate returns. Does the new measure of austerity, such as it is, change that?

A. It is interesting you use the word austerity. It doesn’t feel very austere. I think it is better to use the word focus. We are clearly going to be more careful with potential large expense streams, which are of uncertain return. But we are also going to continue to invest certainly in small teams to do wacky things.

Q. Are there examples of projects you have undertaken in the past — things like Chrome, Google’s Internet browser, or Android, its mobile operating system — that you wouldn’t do today?

A. The question is, with today’s market, would we still have done the things you named? Absolutely. Going forward, maybe we would do fewer ultimately. The problem here is that if you tighten up too much, you eliminate future innovation and then you set yourself up for a really bad outcome five or 10 years from now.

Q. Google is known for its lavish employee perks. Can you rein in expenses without affecting the culture?

A. The people who manage these areas are very, very sensitive to what is really important versus what is an experiment or a waste of money or what have you. But we have no intention of getting rid of the really important aspects of our culture.

Q. Isn’t it less fun to run a company that has to watch its spending more carefully?

A. I think it is actually more fun. The reason is that it is very easy to be a successful executive in high-growth times. It is much more challenging, but in my view much more rewarding to be a leader in times where you have to make really hard choices.

Q. Earlier this week, Google walked away from an advertising partnership with Yahoo, after the Justice Department said it was planning to block it on antitrust grounds. Yahoo said it would have defended the deal in court and that it was disappointed you chose not to. Was Google less committed to this deal than Yahoo?

A. We were unsuccessful in convincing the Justice Department of something which we strongly feel, which is that providing better value to advertisers would have occurred by virtue of this deal. We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won.

Q. This is the first time that regulators have gotten in the way of a Google deal. Are you concerned that, as many antitrust experts believe, this will happen more frequently now? And if so, was it a mistake for Google to propose the deal in the first place?

A. We have no regrets about attempting to do the right thing from our perspective. With change comes risks. This is a risk that we understood. Now you ask a hypothetical question, which is, Given that that event has occurred, is there another scenario? We don’t see one right now, but you never know.

Q. Will Google think differently about deals after this incident?

A. Probably not. I think that this was a unique situation.

Q. You publicly endorsed Barack Obama for president saying, among other things, that you liked his economic plan. Are there other ideas or proposals that you think could help America’s and Silicon Valley’s economy?

A. The strongest position I have taken from an economic point, with Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama, has been to try to solve all of our problems at once. And the easiest way to do that, at least in domestic policy, is by a stimulus program that rewards renewable energy and over time attempts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. The Google calculations, which we announced about a month ago, indicate that over a 22-year period, you can save a trillion dollars by investing in these technologies, including plug-in hybrids, and thereby reduce our reliance on oil.

Q. Were you concerned that your personal endorsement of Barack Obama would be seen as an endorsement by Google, especially since the company could benefit from some of Barack Obama’s policies on issues like net neutrality or clean energy?

A. I was, and we debated it internally at great length. I ultimately concluded that since there were so many C.E.O.’s who had been endorsing the Republican candidate, it would be O.K. for a C.E.O. to endorse a Democratic candidate.

Q. Barack Obama has said he intends to name a chief technology officer. Have you had any discussions with his team about being a candidate for that position or another role in his administration?

A. I am extremely happy serving the shareholders of Google as the C.E.O., so I have no interest in serving as a government employee.


2008年10月31日 星期五

German Publishers Accuse Google Controlling Culture

Literature | 30.10.2008

German Publishers Accuse Google Controlling Culture

German book publishers denounced a historic accord between Google and US authors, dubbing it trick that would make the US company the master of the world's knowledge.

The Boersenverein, the German booksellers and publishers association which has bitterly opposed Google for years, rejected the accord as a "creeping takeover."

"This accord is like a Trojan Horse," Alexander Skipis, chief executive of the Boersenverein, said in a statement on Thursday, Oct. 30. "Google aims to achieve worldwide control of knowledge and culture.

"In the name of cultural diversity, this American model is out of the question for Europe," he said, adding that it contradicted "the European ideal of diversity through competition."

A pile of booksBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Google has already digitized some 7 million books

The Boersenverein has funded a pay-for-use book-scanning service for German-language books, Libreka.

Google, which has scanned 7 million books to include their contents in its Internet search engine, announced Tuesday it would let US users read the pages of books that are out of print but are still in copyright.

Under the settlement with the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, royalties will be paid for past and future use of the books by Google.

Millions of the books are outdated and their authors dead, so a Google-funded book registry will be set up to discover who now owns the copyrights. Google said it hoped to reach similar deals to benefit Europe and Asia.

In the United States the Google accord has been widely welcomed, since the bulk of books existing today are hard to obtain, as they are no longer on sale and uneconomic to reprint though their copyrights have not expired.

At US public libraries, those books from recent decades will be visible in their entirety on library computers, while 20 per cent of those books will be visible to home users.

For readers in the rest of the world, Google will only be showing about two lines of text at a time.

DPA news agency (sms)

「Google Apps」に99.9%のサービス品質保証制度

米Google、「Google Apps」に99.9%のサービス品質保証制度
INTERNET Watch
米Googleは30日、「Google Apps Premier Edition」の利用者に対し、99.9%のサービス品質保証制度を導入すると発表した。 これまでGoogleは、Google Apps Premier Edition利用者に対して、Gmailのサービス品質保証制度を提供していた。これに加えて今回、Google ...




What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud

10/30/2008 11:42:00 AM
The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don't happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.1

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail's reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn't the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we've learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we're announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We've made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud's promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

1. The Radicati Group, 2008. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2008-2009"

2008年10月28日 星期二

Google Settles Book-Search Suits


Google Settles Book-Search Suits
Google will pay $125 million to resolve lawsuits from publishers and authors challenging its Book Search service, which showed snippets of copyrighted material.


A sweeping $125 million settlement between Google Inc. and the publishing industry clears the way for the Internet giant to make many millions of digital books available on the Web, with payments to authors and publishers for their use.

If approved by a federal court, the deal, struck after two years of negotiations, will let individuals and institutions buy online access to copyrighted, out-of-print works through Google, and will provide free online views of them at public libraries.

Current titles will be available only if publishers and authors agree to include them.

2008年10月22日 星期三

G1叫板iPhone by Walter S. Mossberg

閱讀全文


谷歌G1叫板iPhone

2008年10月21日14:24



近幾年出現了一類激動人心的新掌上電腦﹐它可以被裝進口袋﹐
有著手機的外貌但用途更像筆記本電腦。到目前為止﹐有一款機型一直獨霸這個領域。不過這種狀況將於10月22日被改寫﹐屆時﹐T-Mobile和谷歌(Google)將聯合推出G1--首個可以和蘋果iPhone相媲美的掌上電腦。

T-Mobile USA
G1與iPhone一樣配備了智能觸摸屏
我在多個城市、多種環境下對G1進行了廣泛的測試。總體來說﹐我喜歡這款產品﹐覺得它足以和iPhone一較高低。這兩款設備都基於高速3G電話網絡運行﹐都包含Wi-Fi功能﹐都有靈活的觸摸界面和強大的網絡瀏覽器﹐而且都可以輕鬆下載第三方應用程式。

不過這兩款產品各有千秋﹐可能吸引不同的用戶群。

如果你追求iPhone的功能﹐但不喜歡它的虛擬鍵盤或用戶界面﹐或它的美國電信運營商美國電話電報公司(AT&T Inc.)﹐那麼G1也許正合你心意。不過G1有一些突出的缺點。目前來看﹐G1最大的差異化特徵在於它的實體鍵盤﹐滑開屏幕就可以看到。在我的測試中﹐鍵盤性能顯得一般﹐按鍵太平﹐明亮的光線下很難看清﹔而且鍵盤的右邊高於其他部分﹐輸入時手總要越過這個地方。不過﹐對於很多不能忍受在玻璃上輸入的人來說﹐G1的實體鍵盤應該會受歡迎。此外﹐G1還有一個類似黑莓手機那樣的導航軌跡球﹐方便用戶使用。

G1的電池可拆卸﹐其記憶體卡可拆卸可擴容。G1的價格甚至都要比它的競爭對手蘋果iPhone稍微便宜一點:售價179美元﹐而iPhone的價格為199美元。G1的數據服務套餐也要便宜:每月25美元﹐而iPhone是30美元。這個套餐還包括400條免費文字短信﹐而iPhone的短信是要額外收費的。G1還有一種35美元的套餐﹐文字短信不限量。而且﹐這兩種套餐都可以免費使用T-Mobile的Wi-Fi熱點。

除了實體鍵盤﹐G1還有一個光滑靈活的觸摸界面﹐而且還自帶一個強大的新操作系統。這個名為Android的操作系統是谷歌開發的。隨著時間的推移﹐它可能還會被應用到其他手機上。Android是一款開源系統﹐其他公司可以對其進行修改﹐因此不同設備上它很可能看起來不太一樣。

G1的觸摸界面平滑而靈敏。向上拖動屏幕底部的標籤﹐相應的應用程式就會顯示在屏幕上。讀取新信息時﹐只要向下拉屏幕頂端的工具條就可以了。

G1的桌面安排比iPhone靈活得多。除了應用程序的圖標外﹐還可以增加個人聯繫方式、音樂播放列表、文件夾以及網頁等等都放在桌面上。只要長按屏幕﹐就會出現一個可添加到桌面上的項目列錶。此外﹐雖然G1攝像頭的像素比iPhone的要高﹐但它也不能拍攝視頻。

用G1打電話比用iPhone容易得多。打電話時﹐只要在主屏幕上輸入聯繫人名字或電話號碼即可﹐不必先進入電話程式或聯繫人程式。G1有虛擬鍵盤﹐這樣你就不必為了撥一個號碼而打開實體鍵盤。此外﹐當列錶較長時﹐G1用戶可以更加輕鬆地跳到頂端或末端。

G1的網絡瀏覽器使用的技術跟iPhone一樣﹐在我的測試中﹐瀏覽器顯示許多常用的網站都很順暢。你既可以用手指來翻動頁面﹐也可以一次查看整個頁面﹐然後通過移動一個小的長方框來聚焦某個部分。

這款主要由谷歌設計並由臺灣宏達電(HTC)製造的手機包含了一些蘋果忽略的重要功能﹐如文本的複製粘貼(儘管十分有限)﹐直接發送圖片到其他手機而無需依賴電子郵件(這種常見的手機功能叫MMS﹐即多媒體通訊服務(Multimedia Messaging Service))。此外﹐跟AT&T不同的是﹐T-Mobile甚至允許用戶90天後合法解鎖手機﹐只要你支付一筆高額的提前終止服務費﹐就可以開始使用其他電信運營商的服務。

在電池測試中﹐G1能堅持一整天﹐但是我每天晚上都得給它充電。這比目前iPhone最初的電池續航能力要強。不過﹐蘋果已經通過軟體升級來提高iPhone電池的續航能力。我發現﹐在使用多種功能的情況下﹐兩款設備電池的表現差不多。

在通話時間測試中﹐G1比其標稱的五小時略短﹐比iPhone約長19分鐘。

T-Mobile USA
G1有兩個電子郵件系統:一個是谷歌Gmail專用﹐另一個可以用於其他電子郵件服務。G1有一個即時通信軟件﹐可以支持多種不同的服務。另外﹐G1還為谷歌的YouTube和谷歌地圖分別提供了相應的接入程序。G1的谷歌地圖程序甚至有一個功能﹐可以提供某些地點的照片式街景。雖然這個功能很快也會被加進iPhone﹐但是與iPhone不同的是﹐G1增加了指南針功能﹐能在用戶走動中通過調整街景指引方向。

G1內置的第三方程式下載商店Market在我的測試中表現良好。我可以快速下載遊戲和其他應用程式。而且﹐谷歌表示不會封鎖任何應用程式。這也是與蘋果的不同之處。

然而﹐G1也有一些缺點。G1的塊頭比較大。雖然比iPhone稍窄﹐拿在手裏感覺還行﹐但它比iPhone要重大約20%﹐厚約30%。它的屏幕也比iPhone小﹐且不支持標準的立體聲耳機。

G1在內存上也很吝嗇﹐手機本身只有1G的內存空間﹐僅為iPhone最低配置的八分之一。如果用戶要擴大內存﹐就得再掏錢買個大些的存儲卡了。

在第三方應用程序的存儲量上﹐G1也設定了128M的上限。在測試中﹐當我下載了一批第三方程式、加入一些歌曲和視頻後﹐G1便提示我空間已經不夠了﹐而我頻繁使用的iPhone從來沒出現過這樣的問題。

對一些用戶來說﹐G1還存在另一個缺點:G1和谷歌線上服務有著非常緊密的聯繫。儘管用戶可以使用其他公司的電子郵件和IM服務﹐但是把通訊錄和日曆導入G1的唯一辦法就是和谷歌的線上日曆和聯繫人資訊進行同步。事實上﹐沒有谷歌的用戶ID和密碼你甚至無法使用G1。

G1不支持微軟的Exchange郵件、通訊錄和日程表等服務﹐也無法與任何其他公司的無線同步技術兼容。

在我的測試中﹐G1和Gmail、谷歌的通訊錄和日程表等應用程序的同步順暢且迅速。因此﹐G1對於忠實的谷歌用戶而言也許是不錯的選擇。但對於依賴雅虎或微軟這些競爭對手所提供的類似服務的用戶來說﹐就未必這麼合適了。未來的Android手機在這方面或許會有所改善﹐不過G1與谷歌相關服務的聯繫的確太緊密了。

此外﹐G1完全無法直接跟PC或Mac電腦進行數據同步。比如﹐它不能跟微軟的Outlook或PC上的Windows媒體播放器同步﹐也不能跟蘋果機上的iCa和通訊錄同步﹐自然也無法和iTunes同步了。G1本身也沒有提供任何的同步軟體﹐用戶也沒法自動對設置、音樂、應用程式、視頻或照片等進行備份﹐不管是備份到電腦上還是放到網絡存儲服務。但谷歌表示﹐計劃增加備份功能。

要把Outlook或iCal的資料載入G1﹐G1用戶必須安裝附加軟體。要把歌曲、視頻和照片載入到G1上﹐必須把手機或其存儲卡插到電腦上﹐手動拷貝文件。

總的來說﹐我覺得G1的用戶界面遜色於iPhone﹐它不能像iPhone那樣用手指快速在多個照片和網頁間跳轉﹐也不能簡單地用手指的伸縮來放大或縮小照片或網頁。它也不能像iPhone那樣﹐在機身翻轉時自動調整屏幕的顯示方向。

再者﹐很多常見功能在iPhone上都處於顯眼的位置﹐但在G1上﹐就得通過菜單按鈕或使用鍵盤快捷鍵才能實現﹐而且你還得記住這些快捷鍵。比如﹐停止載入網頁﹐或轉到下一個網頁等。

即使是像輸入網址這樣的快速操作﹐G1也沒有螢幕鍵盤可用﹐因此用戶得不斷要把手機翻過來﹐打開實物鍵盤﹐而這個很快就會讓人感覺厭煩。

此外﹐從多媒體功能上看﹐G1也遠不及iPhone。G1的音樂播放器雖然夠用﹐但不如iPhone內置的iPod那麼棒。而且﹐G1根本沒有視頻播放器﹐用戶可以從Market上下載一個初級版本。不過﹐G1確實配有一個可以從Amazon購買歌曲的程式﹐在我的測試中﹐該功能運作良好。

再來說說網路。儘管AT&T的3G網絡仍在擴建﹐而且麻煩不斷﹐但這家公司已為iPhone和其他設備在美國320個城市提供3G服務。相比之下﹐T-Mobile的3G服務所覆蓋的美國城市只有20個。儘管到年底還有八個城市加入T-Mobile的覆蓋範圍﹐但相比AT&T以及即將推出黑莓Storm的Verizon﹐T-Mobile的3G網絡覆蓋範圍還是落後得多。

我進行了40次速度測試﹐比較G1和iPhone在3G網絡中網頁加載速度。這些測試分別在亞利桑那州斯科茨代爾和華盛頓進行。結果顯示﹐iPhone始終要比G1快一些。儘管AT&T網絡的擁擠程度遠遠高於T-Mobile﹐iPhone的平均速度可以達到每秒5萬至10萬字節。

總的來說﹐G1為谷歌在手機方面的嘗試打響了漂亮的第一炮。對於那些更喜歡實體鍵盤或T-Mobile、想加入到強大的口袋電腦新世界的人來說﹐G1不失為一個理想的選擇。

Walter S. Mossberg

(編者按﹕本文作者Walter S. Mossberg是《華爾街日報》科技欄目Personal Technology﹐Mossberg's Mailbox等欄目的專欄作家。這些欄目主要介紹一些最新的消費類科技產品和解決方案﹐並解答讀者提出的問題。)

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