Tag Archives: Google

Sports More Important Than Technology Business in Silicon Valley Newspaper

Posted on by
Reply

The Mercury News’ demoting its business coverage to the back pages of the Sports Section was a populist victory even before Trump’s election. Or does this situation simply derive from the biblical truism “no prophet is accepted in his hometown”? In any case, the rest of the world—including major newspapers—seems more entranced with the goings-on in San Jose and surrounding cities. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have permanent staff in Silicon Valley who seem to turn out significantly more column-inches of reporting and opinion about technological accomplishments in this geography than do the valiant-but-outnumbered technology staffers at the Mercury News.

This demotion came a few months after the April 2016 renaming of the San Jose Mercury News to to reflect its merger with the San Mateo Times. But the spirit of San Jose, which some years ago was dubbed “the USA’s largest truck stop”, lives on in the focus of its printed media. (Apparently a number of other cities in the U.S. claim that theirs is the largest, and a number of locations have subtitled themselves “Silicon XXXX”, like “Silicon Prairie” which can refer to Dallas-Fort Worth or the Chicago area or a multi-state area of the upper Midwest.) We are a bit baffled because the advertisements in the Mercury News don’t seem to be for products and services that the typical sports fan would buy.

YouTube Takes Bigger Slice of Overall Television Pie

Posted on by
1

youtubevstv-550x309

Google is certainly getting a lot out of the $1.76 billion they spent buying YouTube almost exactly 10 years ago today. As of early 2013 YouTube was experiencing one billion unique viiewes/visitors every month, nearly one out of every two people on the Internet, use it for myriad purposes. Anyone at all can upload or watch videos of cats or dancing babies, and Google benefits because it can charge advertisers to put ads adjacent to those videos.

But either Google had great vision a decade ago or they have more recently realized that they have a great medium, arguably better than conventional television. However, a recent study by Nielsen and Google shows that YouTube and conventional (“linear”) TV may be more complementary than competitive. People are watching TV on YouTube and they are watching YouTube on their TVs, so the gap between the two media is shrinking. In fact, it is shrinking so much that Google has just signed up CBS for its imminent web TV service. And, notwithstanding some folks’ criticisms of CBS, its leader seems to be pretty savvy.

Facebook and Google Create New Homeless People in Silicon Valley in 2016

Posted on by
1

SkyrocketingHousePrices 6 550x366

They may not be sleeping on park benches, but they’ll never be able to afford a house in Silicon Valley. That’s because the household-word high-tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, et al) in the San Francisco Bay Area are adding jobs but no one is adding commensurate numbers of housing units, and the prices of homes is skyrocketing.

The iconic independent bookstore in Menlo Park, Kepler’s Books, and Peninsula Arts & Letters, sponsored a well-attended public forum, “Housing Crisis Stories”, on August 18, 2016. The motivation for the meeting was the disconnect between the huge number of new jobs being created by the giant high-tech companies like Facebook and Google and the tiny number of new housing units being created. According to the local paper, The Almanac (which covers the tony cities of Atherton, Menlo Park, Portola Valley, and Woodside), San Mateo County added 55,000 jobs but only 2,000 housing units (homes plus apartments) between 2010 and 2014. The main source of new jobs is these high-tech companies, but other real estate development is also favoring offices at the expense of housing units.

Except for me (in my TechnologyBloopers persona), who dealt with the new jobs, everyone dealt with the housing shortage. There appeared to be NO representatives from the nearby, Menlo Park-based, Facebook. Many of the attendees were either personally the victims of the rapidly-rising home prices or apartment rents, or were recounting stories of other victims. The poster child for these victims is a Palo Alto planning commissioner—a tech lawyer with a software engineer husband—who is resigning and moving to Santa Cruz because they can’t afford to live in Palo Alto and raise a family there.

Unfortunately, individually they have no power to escape their victimhoods. They will have to band together to elect officials who DO have some power. City Councils in those cities affected will need to be very proactive in forcing the tech companies and real estate developers to deal with the housing shortage. And neighboring cities need to cooperate with each other so that jobs created in one city (which result in revenue both to that city government and to retailers in that city) do not force other cities to deal with housing those new employees.

The problem seems to be a failure to optimize the OVERALL combination of jobs and housing. The technology companies are a big part of the problem and they need to be a big part of the solution. And one way those companies, at least the ones like Facebook and Google whose principal activity is software development (which can be done most anyplace), can be a part of the solution is for them to locate large portions of their staff in regional offices in cities far away from Silicon Valley.

There were some creative solutions mentioned, which would help add housing units, IF the groups concerned would cooperate to change the rules for zoning and construction. One was to build several floors of housing above parking garages. Another was to replace single-story strip malls with multi-level buildings having the retailers at ground levels and housing at the higher levels.

There was one additional issue that seems unique to Palo Alto and Menlo Park (among the cities on the San Francisco Peninsula), namely the gentrification of (formerly) low-priced residential housing in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, and the related issues of racism because of the relatively high percentage of people of color living in those cities. Fortunately, those cities were well-represented in the meeting, and hopefully their inputs will continue to be carefully considered as solutions to the jobs/housing are implemented.

Those Who Live by Google Analytics Shall Die by Google Analytics

Posted on by
Reply

LiveByTheSword1 542x361

We at Wild Bill Web Enterpises have been tracking the visitors (and other metrics) for our three websites–including TechnologyBloopers, WhyMenDieYoung, and Wilddancer—on a weekly basis using Google Analytics and on a monthly basis using our ISP for nearly two years, and are baffled by the helter-skelter, all-over-the-map, random-looking numbers Google Analytics is providing us. Apparently this is a common problem, with a lot of possible causes, including some possibilities that could be our fault (well, the lack of useful guidance from Google and other sources isn’t really OUR fault). And it isn’t that our visitor volume is so high that we are the victim of Google’s sampling process. But we, and probably millions of other website developers, find it highly difficult, even impossible, to make any decisions based on this data. Why don’t the Internet and the Web take advantage of the huge computing power of the hardware and software to provide reasonably accurate statistics so that we can make things easier and more productive for both us and our visitors?

The Witches’ Brew that is YouTube

Posted on by
1

WitchesBrew1 490x468

Google presciently bought YouTube from its founders in October 2006, “betting that the popular video-sharing site will provide it an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrate from television to the Internet.” Silly us. We thought that YouTube was something that individuals could use to entertain ourselves, and that popular ones would bring their originators (and Google) some (or a lot) of money from ads.

Well, Google sure isn’t making it easy for individuals, thanks to the messy combinations of accounts, email addresses, channels, and browsers that makes it a nightmare to find videos once you have more than one of each of these four entities. And to make matters worse, Google threw its failing Google+ social network into the brew. Using Chrome we find three channels (or are these accounts?)—Wilddancer, Beekeeping (thus far empty as we try to sort out the whole mess), and Bill Coggshall—associated with one email address, and two channels—Car Tunes by Coggshall (which started out as “Car Tunes” that YouTube allowed me to reserve then reneged and forced me to add “by Coggshall”) and bill@technologybloopers.com (strange-looking channel, no?)– associated with a different email address (bill@technologybloopers.com). Using Firefox we find two channels (or accounts?)—Car Tunes by Coggshall and bill@technologybloopers.com—associated with email address bill@technologybloopers.com.

Usability Testing: More Honored in the Breach than the Observance

Posted on by
Reply

BreachNotObservance 498x593

The Internet and the Worldwide Web have arguably changed the path of history. And they have made companies like Google into mega successes. But those companies have also caused much consternation among their millions of users. Why? Apparently they don’t bother to check with many (or any!) of those users to see how logical and self-evident their websites and associated tools are for their target audiences. Examples abound, and we will be posting some of the more egregious. But the Internet giants could have been even more successful, and keep website visitors on their sites longer (where they would be exposed to more advertisements) if their user interfaces were less opaque. The goal is usability, which is not rocket science. Two of most used tools are the Chrome browser and YouTube, which we will discuss in separate posts.

Is Amazon the New Apple?

Posted on by
1

iPhoneSaturation2 550x343

Will Apple topple from its perch as the world’s most valuable company? The stock market didn’t reflect Apple’s declining smartphone sales far enough ahead, which led to a drop in share price when year-over-year Q1 iPhone sales declined nearly 15%. And while the overall market grew about 4%, leader Samsung stayed flat, and a handful of Chinese companies rose ominously. Apple’s reliance on the iPhone for growth has become a weakness.

But there is another important consequence. If you look at total market capitalization (total shares times share price), Apple is declining rapidly and Amazon is rising rapidly. For the last 3 calendar quarters, the top 5 companies in the world have included only Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and Exxon Mobil, and the top 3 were only Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft. But Apple’s market cap(italization) in 1Q2015 was more than double ANY other company, while in 1Q2016 there were 7 other companies with market caps over half of Apple’s. But In 1Q2015 Amazon was not in the top 10. It was #10 in 3Q2015, and #4 in 1Q2016 (getting profitable helped a lot). And Amazon is not dependent on one product line.

Ads Based on Recent Shopping Miss Their Target

Posted on by
Reply

TravelsmithMensPantsAndBlouse 541x298

I was shopping for MEN’s pickpocket-proof travel pants, and I must have visited travelsmith.com in my search. That was on Monday, May 2. Now, on Wednesday, May 4, EVERY site I visit—on searches totally unrelated to clothing—I am dealt a Travelsmith WOMAN’S Walkabout Knit Short-Sleeved Drape-Neck Top. I hope that Travelsmith is not paying Google (I am using Chrome) or another ad-dealing company very much for these ads. What is their logic? Do they think that I want to buy my wife this top (admittedly, at $27 it IS a lot cheaper than the pants)? Fortunately, after repeating this advertisement ad nauseum, Google graciously offered to let me fine-tune my ad preferences. Hmmm.

But there must be millions of other victims of these faulty algorithms. And some folks, such as the Wall Street Journal’s satirist Joe Queenan, are even more outspoken (e.g., in his ridicule of Amazon, Expedia, and Netflix).

Surveymania: A Toxic Internet Disease

Posted on by
Reply

DopeySurveys-Pickles 550x261

Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do something. Unfortunately, the millions of souls around the world writing software are adding functionality a lot faster than overburdened consumers can use it. We can’t think of a better example of this than the now-omnipresent survey that arrives in our Inboxes within microseconds of our buying a product or using a service. The volume of junk snail mail is minuscule compared with that of junk email and junk surveys. Our own productivity and enjoyment of life are victims of this trend.

Well, you say, if we don’t vote for what we want, we are likely to be a victim of those lowlifes who do vote … for bad products and services. The best defense is to delete most all such surveys … heresy coming from a career market researcher, no? Certainly you should delete ones that clearly are just knee-jerk reactions from your suppliers. Worst are the ones that are pure bureaucracy, usually characterized by (1) purely multiple-choice questions with no open-ended ones where some insight may lie, and (2) a preponderance of questions about unimportant aspects but none or few about important ones. A recent one from Stanford Health Care was rife with such useless questions as (1) ease of scheduling your appointment , (2) minutes waited between scheduled appointment time and call to an exam room, (3) minutes waited in the exam room before being seen by a medical person, and (4) friendliness/courtesy of the nurse/assistant; nothing at all about the quality of the doctor’s diagnosis or the outcome of his/her prescribed treatment.

Perhaps even worse were those organizations who should, or even do, encourage feedback to correct their errors or improve their offerings, but then don’t take any action or even thank you. Google Translate, Google Maps, and Spreadshirt (custom T-shirts) come to mind. There is a time-tested principle that the best suppliers are those who listen to their customers and take actions to fix their errors or improve their products or services.

Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword

Posted on by
Reply

GoogleDorking5 550x330

But it’s already too late to put the sword back in its place. The Internet, the Worldwide Web, Google Search, social networks, and other on-line miracles have given billions of people capabilities they never had dreamed of. But in their haste the makers of these tools have also enabled evil-doers capabilities beyond the masses’ worst nightmares. History is full of other technological advances that have been used for both good and evil purposes, but more recently cyberattacks have permitted individuals or small groups, sitting in safety at their personal computing devices, to wreak havoc on millions of innocent victims. These cyberattacks appear to be increasing in frequency and scope of havoc. Most recently several news sources reported the charging of an Iranian hacker on March 24 of his 2013 attack on a dam in Rye Brook, NY, which he found vulnerable using a technique called Google Dorking. (The wheels of justice certainly turn slowly … especially compared with the speed of computers and their hacker masters!)

Apparently he did not use his knowledge to operate the sluice gate of this small dam (perhaps because it was disconnected from computer control at the time). And although this dam is in a rather backwater community (pun intended) and not much of a threat to national security or even significant injury to people or damage to property, the ability of the hacker to infiltrate the computer system demonstrates a capability to attack a much bigger and more dangerous dam or other strategic infrastructure such as an electric power grid.

The really scary thing is that almost certainly many other sectors are under similar attacks. One such sector is hospitals. Within the last two months the computer systems at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the Methodist Hospital in Henderson, KY, and the MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC were crippled by cyberattacks. These were not minor incidents; the overall MedStar 10-hospital group has 30,000 staff and 6,000 affiliated doctors. And patients in critical condition could die from the delays caused by inoperative computer systems.

Another sector is financial. On March 29 hackers breached the security at two large law firms whose giant Wall Street banks and corporate clients are constantly dealing with confidential matters, knowledge of which could net hackers millions of dollars through insider trading.

The general populace can only hope that the responsible governmental agencies are working hard to identify strategic facilities throughout the U.S. and its allies, and alert vulnerable ones so they can take steps to minimize the dangers from Google Dorking and other hacker nastiness. And also hope that “white hat hackers” (the good guys)–the modern-day equivalent of yesteryears’ vigilantes—step up their activities. It would help considerably if these strategic facilities would reward these hackers for their efforts.