Netizen

Google Fiber is certainly way out there.

Google Fiber Is The Most Disruptive Thing The Company's Done Since Gmail

All Google Fiber customers also get 1TB of free storage. If they buy TV service for an extra $50 a month, Google will throw in a $200 Nexus 7 tablet to be used as a remote control. Google is also giving away -- for free -- a package that offers 5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. ...... Google was able to get prices so low, in part, because it designed and built all the hardware for the system itself. This is a good reminder that although Google wasn't a consumer electronics company until recently, Google has actually been designing hardware for its data centers for more than a decade. It was this data center efficiency that allowed Gmail to offer way more free storage than competitors back in 2004....... just like Gmail unlocked an enterprise business, Fiber could unlock a whole new business as an ISP and TV provider..... Now, we just need Google to roll out Fiber to the rest of the country.

If Google can figure out a way to use snooping technology to serve well targeted ads it could make internet access ad supported, and it could take top speeds to all corners of the world. It would not be limited by Fiber. Heck, it could use satellite technology as necessary.

This is the single most important thing Google could do. At globally universal broadband, Google surpasses the nation state in power. It also becomes a trillion dollar company in the process.

That "5Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream" free deal is a big deal.

At 1 GB, YouTube has no more disadvantages to traditional TV. Video ads fetch more.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Soccer Secrets

PageRank Algorithm Reveals Soccer Teams' Strategies

Many readers will have watched the final of the Euro 2012 soccer championships on Sunday in which Spain demolished a tired Italian team by 4 goals to nil. The result, Spain's third major championship in a row, confirms the team as the best in the world and one of the greatest in history. ...... Spain's famous strategy of accurate quick-fire passing, known as the tiki-taka style. ..... a quantifiable representation of a team's style, identifies key individuals and highlights potential weaknesses. ..... think of each player as a node in a network and each pass as an edge that connects nodes. ..... the Spanish team pass more often..... image captures 417 passes by the Spanish team versus 266 for the Netherlands. ..... That the goal keeper was the Netherland's best connected player itself speaks volumes. ..... Players with a high betweenness centrality are crucial for keeping the momentum of the game going ..... the famous PageRank algorithm which measure's a player's popularity, as judged by the number of passes he receives from other popular players. ..... adding another node to represent the opponents goal and would record the number of shots .... measure the accuracy of passes .... The defensive strength of a team could also be incorporated in the model by tracking passing interceptions and recovered balls .... a way of collecting and analysing the data in real time to produce a network-based analysis of a game as it happens ..... In terms of data analysis, football has always lagged behind more statistically-friendly games such as American football, baseball and cricket, because it lacks the long pauses during which data can be gathered and analysed. That looks set to change.