Solar OP Technology Blog

We all have mobile phones, some of us carry more than one. But going mobile is not only about making phone callson the go. With the birth of the iPhone, going mobile now means staying connected all the time.The competition between hardware manufacturesrs is a true blessing for customers. The mobile war between Android-based phones vs. iPhone (vs. Windows mobile in the near future) brought prices down, making smartphones a household item. Despite this war, mobile hardware manufacturers have been very successful - Apple being the best example, but other manufacturers such as Samsung and Motorola are making solid profits off of their mobile divisions.

But what about mobile carriers? On one hand, the smartphones opened new revenue streams for mobile carriers. Staying connected all the time requires a lot of data to go from and to your phone. Unlimited data packages are slowly becoming the norm, and the new frontier seems to be mobile broadband – now that we all have internet access from our phones, we will soon require broadband access. That’s another possible revenue stream for mobile operators, but it also means a large investment in infrastructure.

Additionally, the competition between mobile carriers can be quite a challenge. As far as hardware is concerned, not everyone has a smartphone yet, and as new models are coming out, consumers are likely to want to upgrade. As far as mobile carriers go, we have all already signed up with our preferred carrier. Attracting  customers is not a simple task, and the question is – is it all about the price? Price is certainly a strong selling point, but mobile carriers are becoming more and more creative.

One way of attracting customers is simplicity in mobile, as O2, the UK mobile carrier has been pushing. The idea is to make service plans simple and easy to understand. You can choose to use a data package, but only if you need one.

In South Korea, where users are accustomed to very fast and cheap internet connection, Korea Telecom is building a 4G wireless network that can be a differntial factor for mobile users desiring high speed Internet access. Other operators are partnering with content providers to offer various interesting media for consumption buy smartphone owners. Which model will prevail? That remains to be seen.

Today’s hottest technology news, according to tFeeder:

• Techrunch Robin Wauters (the leading Techrunch blogger in terms of tweets-per-post), reports that Youtube no longer supports Internet explorer 6. IE6 is a terrible product, but where does it stop? Could Google one day say ‘we do not support IE6,and IE7, and IE8′ ? The post is Boiling, with over 1,000 retweets in the past couple of hours.
• Techrunch also reports that sales of the Palm Pre are flat. Techrunch has a long history with the Plam Pre, as they criticized the product early on and caused quite a stir when a fellow tech blogger reviewed a giveaway Palm Pre, hinting foul play
• Cnet news has an interesting story about the growing importance of Chip makers (e.g. Intel) as the Google-Microsoft war expands. It used to be a software war, between search engines, office suites and online services, but since Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS, it’s becoming a hardware war as well.
• Engadget, the gadgets blog, reports that Apple crossed the 1.5 Billion downloaded apps mark. That’s truly amazing. Apple invented the market for application downloads and no one to date was able to imitate its success.

Read more…

The latest, hottest technology news from tFeeder:

• It’s interesting to see that 2 of the top 5 top technology stories on tFeeder are Techcrunch stories,and one story is a Wired story – usually the top 5 are owned by Mashable (see screenshot below).
• Techcrunch‘s Michael Arrington reports that a company called DST is buying stocks from Facebook employees. That means a lot of happy faces on the Facebook campus, congratulations! Mashable also covers this story and it’s a BOILING story on tFeeder.
• Techcrunch also has a story written by an anonymous person, an executive from one of the largest Internet companies (at least this is what they say, who knows, a PR stunt??), suggesting the whole Google ranking and SEO industry should be regulated. That would mean many SEO companies will die, I don’t see it happening.
• A big story is coming from Mashable‘s Adam Ostrow – apparently Microsoft will offer its office 2010 suite (Word,Excel etc.) as a hosted service, similar to Google Apps. Is this Microsoft’s counterpunch to Google’s Chrome OS announcement?
• ReadWriteWeb suggests that comments are dead and tweets are their replacement. These days, everyone thinks that Twitter will kill everything – it will kill Google search, it will kill RSS, now it will kill comments. Whatever..

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A few years ago, when technology blogs started becoming popular, I used to waste a lot of time visiting each blog, trying to find interesting technology stories. Then RSS became popular, and as most tech blogs started offering RSS subscription, much of the time spent on visiting each blog was reduced to a short, periodic visit to my RSS reader, looking for interesting technology stories.

But as time went by, I realized that RSS was not enough. Although it offers a simple way of accessing a large amount of content, it lacks one major feature – ranking. The RSS protocol was never meant to include any information in regards to the quality of each story. There were many other options to find hot stories (such as Digg), but in the past few months, there’s a new kid on the block – Twitter. And as most technology bloggers would agree – Twitter is becoming a powerful a recommendation engine, particularly useful for promoting interesting technology stories.

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About 7 years ago I decided to build a search engine for video clips (yes, including adult clips). Youtube was still an egg, and low-quality video clips started popping like mushrooms after rain. I spent about 3 weeks on the project, until I realized that’s a lot harder than I though. The amount of data you need t crawl and index is huge, you never know where an innocent link will lead you.

Fast forward to 2009. I decided I’d build a search engine, inspired by the launch of Bing. I though I’d take it straight at good old B. gates (is he still with the company??). I  didn’t have much time to spend on the project, and I’m broke. So I decided I’ll build a search engine in 1 hour, spending no more than 10$.

The 1 hour, 10$ Search Engine: PinGoog

Here’ how:

1. Google Custom Search – why crawl, index and search when you can outsource all these activities? So I outsourced it to Google. They offer Google Custom Search – a Google search box anyone can embed inside any webpage, directing the search query to Google own search engine. Results are displayed on a Google’s page, or on your own page. Revenue generated from click on ads in the results page is shared.

2. Google App Engine – you need a webpage (a simple html page would do the trick) to accommodate the Google search box. There are many places yo can host the page (free or paid hosting etc.). I decided I’d use Google App Engine. First, It’s free. Second, I have experience using it (solarplanez.com, for example). And third, and most important , it’s infinitely scalable. So if I get a sudden spike of traffic when a top tech blogger links to PinGoog Google App Engine handles it easiliy – I don’t have to worry about the service crashing due to lack of resources or a poor hosting plan.

3. Register domain name – That’s where the 10US$ went (actually,the project went over-budget: 10.19$ for the domain name). I mistakenly used GoDaddy to register the domain name. What I should have done was use Google Apps own domain name registration services – it would make things more simple (read below why).

4. Register with Google Apps - since my application runs on Goolge App Engine, by default, its URL is something like: http://pingoog.appspot.com. I wanted to change that to a my own domain name,  pingoog.com. To do that, I had to sign up for Google Apps. Only through Google Apps was I able to change my application’s URL to http://www.pingoog.com. When you register with Google Apps, you can buy the domain name through them- it’s a good idea because you don’t have to configure DNS on GoDaddy (or any other domain register service you used).

Steps 1-4 took me about an hour of work. It cost me 10.19US$ for the domain name registration – everything else was free! Since then, I continued working on PinGoog, trying to spice things up.

5. Miscellaneous APIs – Once the search engine was up and running, I decide to add some real time data, collected from various web sources, to make the search experience a bit more fun, interesting and unexpected. I connected to API services from Digg, Yelp and Google News. From Digg – I pull the top rated stories in different topics and from Yelp, I provide localized review services, currently for the US only. So if you visit PinGoog from New York, it will show you reviews of bars, restaurants, movie theaters and other interesting information, all from New York, all randomly.

No two visits to PinGoog are the same.

And yes, if you keep visiting PinGoog to do your Google searches, you’ll get to play the games.

Just noticed that when you do a search in Google, the logo in the search results page is a Tetris game – a Google logo made of Tetris! I wonder what was the score on that game…

Here’s the screenshot:

Update: It appears the Google Tetris logo appeared all over the globe, in some countries replacing the official logo in Google’s homepage. It marks the 25th anniversary of the invention of the Tetris game.

You might have also noticed that the screenshot was taken form an Ubuntu Linux machine running Google’s chrome browser. I’ll review Google Chrome on Linux in a couple of days. Register to our RSS feed to read this and other technology news.

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine. We all know that, part due to the fact that Microsoft will spend about 100MUS$ in advertisement. But someone didn’t quite agree with the definition of Bing as a search engine – arch-rival Google, the undisputed king of search. It’s gonna be a war, and I found earlier today that Bing drives higher quality traffic to my blog.

Google Analytics is a service Google provides to webmasters and bloggers who are interested in knowing how many people visit their blog and most importantly, where they come from.

But when Goolge Analytics display statistics for ‘Traffic Sources’ ‘, it divides them into categories – direct traffic, referring sites , search engines etc. I found it very surprising to see that traffic I get from Bing is listed under the ‘Referring Sites‘ category, and not the ‘Search Engine‘ category.

Here’s the screenshot:

I don’t believe this is a mistake, as someone had to classify Bing to a Traffic Source type. This being such a delicate issue, I’m sure it’s been discussed thoroughly inside Google.

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There’s  been a lot of bang around Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine over the last few days. According to StatCounter, Bing already bypassed Yahoo in search volumes. Personally, I don’t trust any Microsoft service since they deleted my entire Hotmail mailbox, which included some very important emails. I’ll never trust them again.

Looking through one of my blogs (Open Source ERP) Google analytics figures, I noticed something very surprising – although obviously,  most of the traffic to that blog comes from Google searches, Bing drives much higher quality traffic. Higher quality traffic means visitors who view more pages, stay longer on my blog (twice as long as Google-driven users!!), and most significantly, do not leave my blog without reading any post (‘Bounce Rate’, the lower-the better). In fact, bounce rate of Google visitors is more than twice that of Bing users.

Here are my Google Analytics referrers stats(click to enlarge):

My  open source ERP blog doesn’t get much traffic (about 500 daily  visitors), so there might be a skew in my stats. It would be interesting to hear from other tech bloggers if they experience the same behaviour.

We’ve had enough. Sure, Twitter is cool. Everyone’s using it. But the more you use it, the more you realize something’s wrong. You can’t point it out. Well, let us point it out for you – 140 characters are not enough. It’s too limiting.
So we hereby declare Project Tweeti 500. The goal? convince Twitter to cancel the 140 characters limit it currently imposes upon its users, and allow messages as long as 500 characters.

To show support for our goal, all you have to do is add a comment bellow, that says Tweeti 500 (all other comments for this post will be deleted). Please leave a valid email address and name. We will maintain a count of the comments in our homepage, hoping we can make a difference.

The official Youtube Clip – The Tyranny Of The 140

Aside from commenting this post, please use the SHARE button below to spread the word amongst your friends. Every comment counts!

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Last year the people at Google announced project 10^100 – an ambitious plan to crowd-source world changing idea generation . The model they chose was to put 10M US$ into selected ideas, which will be developed by organizations Google thinks can turn these ideas into products (I have a better model supporting a similar cause – jumpstart the technology revolution). Since there are so many people in the world who think they are smart (including myself), Google was overwhelmed by submissions.
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