On Feb 10, Google launched a new social networking product – Google Buzz, right inside Gmail. After that there have been scores of blog-posts regarding the privacy flaws in Google buzz. Clearly the transition from something as personal as Mail to another thing as public as buzz wasn’t going to be simple. The latest update on this issue is that Google has admitted that testing of Buzz was insufficient. continue

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Hrishikesh Thite is a second year management student at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. This unabridged article was originally written as a term paper for a course on Analysis of ICT Markets. It is fairly long, so consider yourself forewarned. There is a summary of sorts, at the end, for those who want to briefly visit the gist of the paper. continue

There was a time when the professor’s word was the final claim. There was no point in refuting it. It had to be accepted, unchallenged and unbiased. Information was concentrated in a few heads and it was held there steadfastly.

But slowly came in a wave that shook the ground beneath the professors. It was a silent competitor, but a friendly guide, a genie that answered all questions put forth. It was unbiased, truthful and it never forgot once the piece of information that was stored between the HTML tags. It simply knew just about everything. It was omniscient. The wave was the tsunami of data that Google unleashed at the click of the button. continue

In my earlier post, I wrote about the Bing-Yahoo search deal and how it was beneficial to both parties, with Microsoft potentially reaping bigger benefits over a longer term. Today another important deal happened. Friendfeed, a popular real time microblogging tool – similar, much more advanced in functionality, but much less popular than Twitter, was taken over by Facebook. According to the official friendfeed blog, FriendFeed accepted Facebook’s friend request! continue

July 29 was truly a momentous day. First, we saw this huge re-positioning of twitter. Twitter has moved away from the social networking focus on homepage (where facebook is dominant anyways) to a people powered search engine focus- where it is clearly dominant. While that is quite significant, nothing could beat the importance of the announcement coming from Yahoo HQ & Microsoft HQ about the Search deal. continue

Ding Ding Ding:

Round 1:
Microsoft and Google enter the ring. Microsoft has been the reigning heavyweight champ for years. But Google has grown in size and strength rapidly and has become one of the top rivals to Microsoft.
Microsoft needs to make a move. It tries to beat Google by taking over Yahoo’s search engine, but fails badly. Now it jabs at Google with its own search engine: Bing. Microsoft scores some points with that one, but the young and strong Google parries the blow and seems unaffected. Instead some competitors in the search engine business to both MS and Google are affected. Microsoft manages to gain some respect in this round but things largely remain unchanged. continue

A long long time ago there was a service called Yahoo! Messenger. Even I used to be a very loyal customer of Yahoo! Messenger, such a loyal customer that even when I went to a cyber cafe for a public computer I user to always sign into Yahoo! Messenger first. Yahoo! Messenger was the lifeline of campuses, for communication with friends, gf/bf, random chat and everything else. But that was ofcourse a long time ago! continue

Is Microsoft back in internet search with the new web search service BING?

The biggest buzz in the search/web/internet domains from the past couple of days has been Microsoft Bing! It has been deemed by some as better than Google, by others as comparable to google and by a few the engine which will dethrone Google. I will give such big claims a rest and in this post I will emphasize on how BING can create a bang in the search market space and bring Microsoft live again in the market! continue

I don’t know if the title is able to make is clear enough but this article is actually about Google (the search engine), Wolfram Alpha (the computational knowledge engine) and Bing (Microsoft’s decision engine). continue

One thing you know when Google launches a new application is that there is something very exciting in store. Something is going to change in this world. There is going to be a newer and better way of doing things. Their brand has got so much of the words “refreshing change” attached to it all over, making it really special. However, it isn’t just a joke to come up with such a power brand. It requires a systematic well planned out strategy. Here is what I think went right for them strategically.
The first thing that Google did absolutely right was get the product perfectly right. Internet is huge. Search Engines were there even before Google. But Google through its superior technology was one step ahead of competition each time. This is how they managed to enter the internet, making some space out of nowhere, and opening up a completely new dimension to the world of Internet. continue