Category: google (Page 3 of 4)

      Google drops $100 million in Zynga

      July 11, 2010 /

      Zynga.Everyone knows Farmville as a Facebook phenomenon, but the people at Zynga are getting to know it as a cash cow. The Facebook game has gotten so much attention that Google has decided to invest more than $100 million in Zynga, supposedly in preparation for the launch of Google Games.

      Can Zynga really stand as the cornerstone for Google’s Games operation? Absolutely. The company is projected at $350 million in revenue for the first half of 2010, half of which is actual operating profit. Total profit for 2011 is expected to be over a billion dollars. A billion, people. With a “b.”

      Here’s TechCrunch on why Zynga is so important for Google:

      Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too.

      Who knew a silly social game could make such a huge impact.

      Gaming, google, News, Websites

      Woman sues Google over walking directions

      June 1, 2010 /


      If you haven’t had your dose of the absurd for the day, get this – a California woman is suing Google for its Maps walking directions after being hit by a car, claiming the directions put her in unnecessary danger.

      It’s actually difficult for me to write this without employing a constant stream of expletives but I’ll try. Laura Rosenberg wanted to walk from one place to another in Utah, the quickest route for which was apparently Utah state route 224, a rural highway. Rosenberg then gets drilled by a car, which sucks, but her response is to sue the company that gave her one of many possible routes, routes that she has the power to modify with a simple drag/drop, for the injuries.

      The part that scares me, though, is that Google’s disclaimer – “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution — This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” – is not visible on mobile phones. I’d like to trust a judge to tell Miss Rosenberg to consider a lobotomy alongside her reconstructive surgery, but if history tells us anything it’s that ridiculous litigation has a home in the good old US of A.

      Photo from fOTOGLIF

      google, Mobile, News

      Google Pac-Man wrecks the world’s productivity

      May 25, 2010 /

      Google's Pac-Man tribute.Last week the Google logo was turned into a playable version of the classic Pac-Man. It was completely awesome, and I can honestly say I spent too much time chasing blue ghosts (and of course smashing my fists on my desk when one of them suddenly because a real ghost again just as my hungry, yellow mouth touched it). Apparently I wasn’t the only one playing.

      I don’t know if you pay much attention to RescueTime but you better hope your boss doesn’t. RescueTime is a productivity analysis tool that shows companies how their employees are spending their time, supposedly in the hopes of helping them. The company did a little research on the time spent at the Google homepage when Pac-Man launched, and the results are astounding.

      This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.

      If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

      -Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
      -$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
      -For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
      -$298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

      I hope you’ve enjoyed our Pac-Man data journey as much as we have. Next up in our on our data-hacking list, we’ll be digging in to find the laziest and most productive countries and cities in the world. Where do you think yours ranks?

      Crazy numbers. I love stuff like this, even if it serves no practical purpose in my own life. Oh, and as far as that productivity thing goes, I can tell you where my city ranks. I live in a beach town. No one is ever doing anything.

      google, News, Websites

      The mobile world is Google’s oyster

      May 23, 2010 /

      Android.

      I’ve spent most of my tech reading time over the past few days reviewing the world’s reactions to Google I/O. Google announced some pretty cool stuff for Android, and the company clearly has Apple in its sights when it comes to market share. Even more interesting to me, though, was that the “Microsoft” didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind. John Gruber put together a great read on the subject, so I’ll defer to him here.

      As Gruber sees it, Google is taking its gigantic, Android-shaped bite out of Microsoft’s pie, not Apple’s. Google is the licensed OS player because it licenses Android for free, not on a fee-per-unit basis. That says nothing of Microsoft’s crazy volume requirements to turn a profit. The company currently charges something between $8 and $12 per handset. When you hold just 6.8 percent of the world market share, that license fee is a joke.

      The volume game isn’t necessarily where you find the profits, either. Nokia sells a LOT more units than Apple, but Apple still makes a better profit. Microsoft is in an absolutely awful position to make a dent in the market. Hell, they still haven’t even launched a competitive platform. Microsoft was already too late when the iPhone launched three years ago. I have to thank John Gruber for this Ballmer quote about the iPhone launch, which I had never seen before:

      “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”

      Well, Steve, I have bad news. The iPhone OS was just reported at 15.2 percent of the global market share. That 80 percent market share you were hoping for? Yeah, that’s never going to happen.

      Source: Daring Fireball

      Apple, google, microsoft, Mobile, News

      Nexus One store is closing

      May 14, 2010 /

      Nexus One storefront.It comes as no surprise that Google’s experiment in phone sales went poorly. It was so bad that the company will be shutting down its Nexus One storefront. Here’s the word from the official Google blog:

      While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not. It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from.

      Yeah, no kidding. I’m not sure why no one spoke up and said this at the meetings that must have happened before the phone launched. If anyone at Google thought Verizon or T-Mobile or Sprint or, well, any carrier would actually want to give up control over phone sales and contract pricing they should be beaten about the head with a sock full of Nexus Ones.

      The new plan? Sell phones like everyone else.

      google, Mobile, News

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