Netizen

Friday, June 05, 2009

All Books Need To Go Digital

Google Books: Primitive

The book industry is in the grips like the music industry used to be. Then Steve Jobs came along and said we are not a nation of crooks, it is not that people don't want to pay, they just like the idea of digital. Don't fight the technology.

Music is like movies, like books. Books and movies are like music. They are mindfood, and they beg to go digital, full-fledged.

All books ever written and to be written should go digital. That is what the technology asks for. That is the consumer wanting. But that does not have to mean money will not be made from books.

Digital is more efficient, cheaper, easier to move around. How is that bad for business? There are millions of in-copyright, but out-of-print books. Are you telling me the digital option is bad for them? Digital will bring them back to life. Digital will give them immortality.

Every book ever written has to be digitized. But I am also all about authors making money. How do you make money?

(1) Self Publish

Publish books like blogs. There are several good, free blogging platforms. And monetize. Run ads. This is not vanity publishing because if you don't get many readers, you don't make much money. Everyone can get published, but not everyone will get a mass readership. As an author I would rather get rejected by readers than by publishers. What about you? You go global without going on a book tour.

(2) Kindle/Google Publish

Find a digital publisher who will put forth digital only editions. So if the paper book had been out there for $29, the digital version will be sold for $9. But how much you make per book sold will not change. Why are you complaining? And you have a much larger potential audience. So you will likely sell more books.

(3) Monthly Subscription

What if I was made to pay $20 per month by a digital books vendor? Or what if there were a Netflix for books? You could pay per book, or for a certain price you could read as many books as you want. And then it would be the vendor's responsibility to pay the authors, give them their cuts.

(4) The Public Library Option

In-copyright books have been available for free at public libraries. There is no reason why they should not be available also digitally. Think of it as free marketing for your books. You do want buzz.

(5) Ads Inside Books

There are ads inside TV shows. Why can't there be ads inside books? You turn from page 25 to page 26, and boom, there is a full page ad that just paid for your first 25 pages of great reading material. This way digital books can be stand alone digital objects, they don't have to stay online and look like webpages.

Of the four options, I think the best one is the ad supported version. Go free, go global, go massive.

Mideast Peace: Tech Industry Style
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Dell, HP, Apple

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation

The technologies behind Google Wave have been designed to bring desktop like experiences into the browser paradigm, but end up doing more than that. The shift and growth are so sure and certain soon we will be missing browser like experiences while on the desktop. Why can't I don this with a desktop client?

The browser is about to take off. The richness will only grow. The speeds will only get faster. The bandwidths will go way up. The masses of people involved will go up both on the production and the consumption sides, and there will be not be any distinct boundary between the two.

The desktop was designed for one person. The browser was always meant for the masses, for crowds. Finally the promise is catching up with capabilities.

This is barely the beginning. Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. There are many ways to use Google Wave as it exists today. There can be much innovation in how it gets applied. It is the difference between Blogger the service and all sorts of wonderful blogs you end up with. And then there are the platform and protocol aspects. Get geared for major technological leapfrogs. Here it is the difference between the iPhone and all its many applications, it is the difference between Hotmail and Gmail.

The Google Wave Architecture
17 Suggestions To Blogger
Square Search
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

On The Web

InfoQ: Google Wave's Architecture Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. The architecture has at its heart the Operational Transformation (OT), a theoretical framework meant to support concurrency control. ....... based on hosted XML documents (called waves) supporting concurrent modifications and low-latency updates. ...... using JavaScript and HTML5 on the client side ....... Java + Python on the server side ..... a public API and the company promises to open source the entire platform ......... modify the base code and extend it with gadgets and robots. ....... Gadgets are small programs running inside of a wave, while robots are “automated wave participants.” Wave can also be embedded in other mediums like blogs. ....... Each wave has a globally unique wave ID and consists of a set of wavelets. ...... A wavelet has an ID that is unique within its containing wave and is composed of a participant list and a set of documents. The wavelet is the entity to which Concurrency Control / Operational Transformations apply. ....... A participant may be a user, a group or a robot. ....... Documents form a tree within the wavelet. ....... the crucial part of Wave’s technology. Google Wave makes extensive use of Operational Transformations (OT) which are executed on the server. ....... Operations are sent to the server and propagated to each client on a character by character basis ......... To start communicating on a wavelet, a client sends an Open Request containing the Wave ID and the Wavelet ID to the server. The server responds with a snapshot - the serialized state of the wavelet - or a history hash of the corresponding version. ........ The Google Wave Federation Protocol allows multiple entities (wave providers) to share waves with each other.
InfoQ: Is Google Wave Going to Have an Impact on RIA/Silverlight? Wave is actually a competitor for Microsoft’s SharePoint and Exchange ....... Flash, Silverlight and Java FX ...... Some of the new features to be introduced in HTML 5 and web API proposals from W3C and WHATWG are: canvas, video, geolocation and web workers. ........ Wave which is making extensive use of HTML 5. ....... the company is “betting big on HTML 5”. ...... The Wave client is a major proof of concept (or pilot project) for HTML5. If the wave client becomes a killer app, it will have a major (negative) impact on other RIA architectures. ....... Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters ........ “Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything.” ........ today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. ....... HTML5 is a working draft still. ....... people have to use those new browsers. The slowness of standards leads me to believe that RIA platforms will be around a while ....... “[Wave] is more about competition with Exchange + IM + OneNote w/Sharepoint Integration + Outlook”. ........ The primary reason we want to open source our code is actually adoption of the protocol. ....... Wave's effect on Silverlight is indirect. HTML will enter in the RIA space with HTML 5, taking a share from Flash and Silverlight. Google's heavy support for HTML 5 will contribute to that.
Google Wave Architecture | High Scalability hosted XML documents (called waves) ..... users from different wave providers can communicate and collaborate using shared waves
Google Wave Federation Architecture ‎(Google Wave Federation ... the Google Wave Federation Protocol for federating waves between wave providers on the Internet. ........ various elements of Google Wave technology - data model, operational transformation, and client-server protocol ...... The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. ....... A robot is an automated participant on a wave (see the robots API). Examples are translation robots and chess game robots. ........ A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. ....... Different wavelets of a wave can have different lists of participants. ......... there is a designated wave provider that has the definitive copy of that wavelet. We say that this particular provider is hosting that wavelet. ......... different users have different wave views for a given wave. ...... the user's read/unread state for the wave, is stored in a user-data wavelet ....... A wave is identified by a globally unique wave id, which is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Like a wave id, a wavelet id is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Wavelets in the same wave can be hosted by different wave providers. ........ a federation gateway and a federation proxy. ........... "local wavelet" and "remote wavelet"
Salesforce rides on Google wave : News : Software - ZDNet Asia
Google Wave Architecture
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity | Web Apps News ...

Wall Calendar: Calendar Marketing

There is but one destination for a custom dry erase calendar. Restaurants have been using it to bring back customers. This is a brand new product, barely a month old.

These can be custom designed for you by WallPaper.us. They are large, attractive, and a great way to imprint an event's date in your customer's minds.

Large restaurant calendars have been a hot item ticket. They have been selling fast because they produce results. A customer who came for a dinner could come back for an event if you have one of these hanging in your entry way. This will stick to any flat surface.

The Google Wave Architecture

With Google Wave, Google has proven it is still the 800 pound gorilla of web technology innovation. So you have to ask, what is behind Google Wave? What's under the hood? Looking at the architecture also gives us a better idea of all that might become possible with this new heart-pounding innovation.

Google wants Wave to become a fundamental web application like email, that most fundamental of all web applications. Email is not actually a web application, it has been around for decades, it just migrated to the web when Sabeer Bhatia came along. Microsoft already had email but still paid Bhatia $400 million for Hotmail, so I guess the migration was a seismic event.

Google offers email, so do Yahoo and Microsoft and every ISP worth its salt, and all those web programs talk to each other. I have the option to send an email from paramendra at gmail dot com to paramendra at yahoo dot com or paramendra at hotmail dot com. Wave is going to be like that.

But only Google does the innovation in Gmail. Wave is not going to be like that. Any outside party could innovate Wave and add new and exciting features, and numerous will. I expect there to be so much innovation in the Wave space that I expect Wave to become like an operating system. We have now moved beyond talking of a browser as an operating system. Now we are going to have to talk of a web application as an operating system. That application is Wave.

Square Search
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

What's your IQ ? a free, online course to increase your knowledge about Google Analytics. The curriculum consists of over 20 self-paced online lessons
Activities and Tasks Design Guidelines how to enrich the user experience you are creating. .... multitasking, activity reuse, intents, and the back stack. .... what it means to design and develop an Android UI.
Top 10 Malware Sites recent surge in compromised web servers ...... more than 4,000 different sites that appeared to be set up for distributing malware by massively compromising popular web sites. Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc. ...... All domains on the top-10 list are suspected to have compromised more than 10,000 web sites on the Internet. .... our Safe Browsing API is freely available and is being used by browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to protect users on the web.
Google Chrome, Sandboxing, and Mac OS X Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine Keyboard shortcuts & Search Operators c: quick call
Improving Freenet's Performance Freenet divides all files into 32KB blocks (called CHKs), which are each fetched and decrypted separately ..... the project took one developer most of a year, the final diff was over 46K lines of code covering 320 files
Introducing the Conversations element Have you been looking for a way to easily add your favorite Google products to your own site? Now you can with Google Web Elements. .... the Conversation element.

A Speedier Google Chrome for all users It's been about 8 months since we launched Google Chrome. Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features. ....... Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch. ....... Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster.
Launching Google Suggest in Swahili Today we have added full support for Swahili - on our domains in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo. ...... The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and we are thrilled to now have Suggest in Swahili.
The best and the brightest I can't think of a better environment than academia for asking hard questions and trying to solve the unsolvable. It's at universities that graduate students perform some of the most exciting and game-changing research in computer science and technology. ...... find the best and brightest PhD students ...... The breadth of research covered by these students and the scope of their vision was astounding. ..... The Google Fellowship will provide them with funding to cover their tuition and expenses, plus an Android-powered phone and a Google mentor.
Google News gets a makeover 7-year anniversary of Google News. ..... a better news browsing experience and connect you to a wide variety of perspectives on current events. Product Ideas - Now for Blogger!
The Google Sites blog is moving Google Sites already has features built in from other Google applications, like when you insert Picasa web albums, YouTube videos, gadgets, and Google Docs into web pages
Monetize!
New in Labs: Automatic message translation Since the heart and soul of Gmail is about helping people communicate, I'm proud to announce the integration of Google's automatic translation technology directly into Gmail. ..... Google's automatic translation technology ...... a language you can understand.
Hierarchical navigation and other new features for Google Sites
Import your mail and contacts from other accounts
30,000 Valeo employees put Google Apps to work putting complex, expensive on-premises IT systems in the past. ..... integrated voice and video chat. Valeo – an auto parts manufacturer with 30,000 Internet-connected employees in 27 different countries – has joined the movement. .... the Google Blog
Tasks, now in Calendar too
Bringing your contacts to the cloud
Calling all teachers we enjoy seeing people learning and working together on Google Sites.
Share your location with your Gmail and Google Talk friends
Manage your contacts, outside of Gmail
New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail
Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes
New in Labs: Extra emoticons
Sheet protection gives you finer control of your spreadsheets
Calling Video Publishers find any video, at any time, from any site.
Statistical machine translation live Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. ....... a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. ....... Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. ..... you probably should not try to translate poetry
Translate between 41 languages with Google Translate we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users. ........ For several languages, Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for these languages. ....... We've heard stories of people using Google Translate to help them do business internationally, and we've seen many websites (e.g., New York's Metro Transit Authority) and blogs add the Google Translate My Page Gadget to their pages to make their content more accessible to people from all over the world. ...... the cross-language search feature .......... Translate provides people who may not otherwise have a lot of web content available in their own language with access to the wealth of content on the truly worldwide web.
30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo and voice and video chat. ...... Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology. ....... Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive.
Gmail voice and video chat I happen to work in the New York City office (one of Google's many distributed offices), while most of my teammates work in the Mountain View headquarters. While we make good use of video conferencing, there are times when I need to talk to a teammate at a moment's notice. .......... Learn more about voice and video chat

On The Web

InfoQ: Google Wave's Architecture
InfoQ: Is Google Wave Going to Have an Impact on RIA/Silverlight?
Google Wave Architecture | High Scalability
Google Wave Federation Architecture ‎(Google Wave Federation ...
Salesforce rides on Google wave : News : Software - ZDNet Asia
Google Wave Architecture
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity | Web Apps News ...

17 Suggestions To Blogger

Image via CrunchBase

Total integration with Google Analytics.
The navigation bar at the top is so much wasted real estate. I want to run ads on there. AdSense ads.
Search option also for private blogs. If I can search through my private Gmail account, why not my private blogs?
Buy Zemanta and integrate it completely to Blogger.
Buy Disqus and integrated it completely to Blogger.
Take a Zemanta/Disqus attitude to the navigation bar.
What if I want to publish a 30 minute video? YouTube only allows for five minutes. I miss Google Video.
A way to display the most popular blog posts on the side bar.
A self-generated site map.
Let's get creative with templates, way more creative. Let's play with that rectangle, big time. Open it up like Android and Wave. Let the crowds hack at it.
Allow for the creation not only of blogs but also blog communities.
Do a better job with Links To This Post. My internal links are not showing, or at least not most of the time. Also true for external links.
Show titled links to newer and older posts for each blog post.
The blog is taking too long to download. Can you speed things up?
Closer Picassa, YouTube, Google News, BlogSearch integration. I want all my blog posts to be multi-media. And I want to do it all from my Blogger Dashboard while composing my posts.
Do not snuff out Google Pages. Google Sites is not Google Pages. Yes, this is related to Blogger. Sometimes I want to publish pages like regular webpages not blog posts that I can link to from my blog posts.
Do not delete old blogs.

Product Ideas - Now for Blogger!

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