The Week in Geek – June 9, 2009

The WiG will continue to publish less frequently in the summer. As this goes live, Baby #3 is T minus two weeks away (yikes). Will be brainstorming on new baby web pages in the tradition of our announcements of Ian (now 9) and Maya (now 3). Suggestions?

Google: Search, Online Advertising, and Beyond…
The latest draft chapter in my free, online textbook project is online. This one covers about one to two weeks of lecture material wrapped around Google. Goal of the project is to leverage what we’ve used at BC (where we’ve seen IS majors balloon 3 fold in 3 years) to provide courseware that’s as engaging as Fortune or BusinessWeek articles, all while wrapped around durable management & tech concepts. This chapter covers organic search, Google infrastructure, search advertising, ad networks, geolocation, customer profiling, privacy, the growth challenge, Google vs. Microsoft, strategy, competitive advantage, anti-trust, and more. Slides from last semester are also online. Comments welcome! And thanks to faculty from Maryland, USC, UC Berkley, UC Irvine, Syracuse, Nebraska, and the many others (large & small) who are already adopting earlier chapters! Your feedback is hugely motivating! Note: Everything you find outside constitute’s my own drafty work. The material will be professionally formatted and professionally hosted later this summer. There’s a link on https://gallaugher.com/chapters for folks interested in formally beta-testing, too.

Commentary: A quick shout-out to David Wiley, COO of my publisher, Flat World Knowledge, who was named one of FastCompany’s most creative people in business, and to Flat World themselves, who made one of Outsell’s 30 innovators to watch in 2009, ranking next to Google! Interesting they’re the textbook case (literally) for Chris (Long Tail) Anderson’s “Free” thesis (original Wired article). The Globe’s Scott Kirsner just called “Free” one of the most highly anticipated books of the year, so timing on: press interest, the economy, and model, may be perfect! Here’s hoping that FWK, with free online texts and sub-$30 printed texts, can disrupt the $175-a-pop titles peddled by rivals.

Pogue on the Latest From Apple’s Big Show
Lots of updates from the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference, headlined by a campus favorite (pictured). Also see the NYTimes’ live blogging coverage or the keynote video at Apple. Phil introduced the new iPhone 3G S. (“The S stands for speed.”). Comes with auto-focus 3MP camera (tap to shift focus), video camera (plus video trim/edit within phone), voice commands for dialing and iPod (you can even voice command Genius functions). There are now 50,000 iPhone apps. IPhone can now leverage a ‘find my phone’ feature if you’ve lost yours, plus now has the ability for consumers to ‘wipe’ lost/stolen phones. ZipCar showed an app to have your Zip-rental remotely ‘honk’ to find it in a full lot (even a non-driver like me thinks this is super-cool)! Neat adoption stat: in ’07 there were 25 million OSX users, now across Macs & iPhones there are 75 million. Old iPhone 3G is now just $99 for 8GB. 3G S ships June 19th, the iPhone 3.0 software update for all will be available on June 17th. In March we learned the free update would include: Copy/Paste, Bluetooth stereo audio, rotatable wide keyboard in all apps, photos in text messages, universal search, audio recording and editing, and more. 13” and 15” MacBooks get those 7 hour per charge embedded batteries. Snow Leopard (the new Mac OSX) should ship in Sept, be faster, smaller (a first) and upgrade will cost just $29.

Pandora: Unleashing Mobile Phone Ads
The popular online music service was founded in ’00, but should finally turn a profit next year. And ad-supported Pandora can thank the iPhone. The firm’s iPhone app has over 5 million users, and brings in another 18-20K new users each day (there are 27 million users overall, mostly desktop, < 1 million on non-iPhone mobile clients). Users currently hear about one 15 sec. ad an hour, but that number will go up to two or three within the year (the avg. Pandora mobile user listens for about 90 mins a day). Ads are pretty innovative. Domino’s Pizza ads on Pandora mobile have a ‘click-to-call’ option, Dockers offered a 20% promo-code discount. Nike & Kraft ads bring users to mini-sites with running tips & recipes, respectively. And home audio firm Sonos claims a 5% click through rate (way above 1-2% best-case averages the firm had seen on other services), and clicking users were more likely explore other messages. If you would like to learn more about PPC advertising, you may want to check out this pay per click agency for more information.

What’s a Friend Worth?
Some fascinating nuggets in BusinessWeek’s cover story & beyond. Facebook, with estimated revenue of $300 million, will bring in scarcely a dime a month per member. Map that against data reported by BusinessInsider, and it seems that by pulling in $500 million, Facebook app developers collectively make more than the platform does (great fodder for the free-rider discussion in our Facebook Case). A few years back Yahoo found that if a user clicked on an ad, their friends were 3 to 4 times as likely to click the same ad. Rapleaf leverages tracking cookies to build these profiles and is seeking three-fold click-through boosts. The avg. Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows only 40, communicates with 20, and keeps in close contact with only about 10. Microsoft just established a Cambridge research division focused on social sciences. Follow @zephoria to get insights from danah boyd, the group’s rock star.

Map of Social (Network) Dominance
Risk-like map showing top social networks around the globe. A great example to bring up during discussions of the Facebook case, particular in case’s section on int’l growth and the value/ROI of international users.

Microsoft’s Effort to Best Google Yields Results
Microsoft’s new ‘decision engine’ is it’s third entry into the search market. Of course, the industry saying is that an MS version 3 is the one you’ve gotta really watch out for. Bing, sports nifty tweaks for specific kinds of queries. Restaurant searches in Bing are bundled with ratings stars, product searches show up with reviews and price comparisons, and airline flight searches not only list flight schedules and fares, but also a projection on whether those fares are likely go up or down. TechCrunch suggests several queries to try. Bing also comes with a $100 million marketing budget, showing that Microsoft is serious about moving its search market share out of the single digits.

Of course, I have a big problem with Bing. It assumes any searches on my name really didn’t want the ‘u’, and instead put a bunch of links for a certain watermelon-smashing comedian, despite all the content associated with the ‘u’ spelling. Blog posts, wiki work, academic papers, teaching material, PowerPoints and podcasts. But to Bing users looking for this stuff, it just assumes you’ve made a typo. For the bald man it’s no respect from Redmond.

The Dubbing of Bing
What’d it take to find the name? Six months, and dozens of experts, including two trademark lawyers and 20 linguists, all poring over 600+ choices. Of course, MS wanted a solid, verb-sounding name, and wanted to avoid other band failures this year (example: Mattel’s latest American Girl Doll, “Rebecca Rubin”, shares a name with an alleged arsonist wanted by the FBI).

Microsoft Reveals New Strategy for XBox
Redmond definitely sees XBox as an entertainment hub beyond just games. New partnerships integrate Facebook and Twitter. Users will be able to view Facebook photos on TVs and watch television in a ‘virtual party room’ with online friends. Steven Spielberg introduced Microsoft’s new Project Natal – a video camera that lets us do away with the controller. The Natal demo Video is a must see. Move hands as a virtual steering wheel/shifter, pretend you’re a monster and breath to blow fire, even voice recognition for trivia games. Very slick!

Hands-on with Weird and Wonderful Wave
Aussie Googlers who gave us Google Maps have come up with a communication tool for our time. Their goal – create a new, open communication platform for today that moves us beyond e-mail and the web. It’s in Beta for developers at Google IO (their version of WWDC). Wave has tremendously slick features, but most impressive were platform hooks that could allow all sorts of collaborative features. Demo video is an hour and a half long, but there’s a lot in there.

Kurzeil on Singularity
This TED talk is two years old, but still right-on for folks using the “Moore’s Law and More” chapter. Great examples, great graphs. And Ray Kurzweil’s the king of goose bump inducing quotes as he charts how room sized tech is now in your pocket and on its way to fitting inside a space roughly the size of a single blood cell. RK closes with the Singularity University announcement, which will start running in the Valley this summer. One of their faculty? Our energy tech, Ethernet inventing, Tech for Good speaker from this past spring, Bob Metcalfe. Follow Bob’s experiences on Twitter @BobMetcalfe.

4 Apps that Turn your iPhone Into a Canvas
A Recent Cover of The New Yorker was actually created using the iPhone Brushes App (watch the video – it’s mezmorizing). That migth inspire you, but if you lack the skils of a pro, the NYTimes suggests four other iPhone apps for doodling.

Google’s Street Mapping Tricycle
To navigate tightly-packed, historic city centers, Google’s commissioned an image-capturing tricycle. PC World offers a photo gallery of the geeky three-wheeler.