Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• The real reason for Google's free 411 service

  Tim O'Reilly speculated why Google is really doing a free 411 service . In short, I'm speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google's own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player. Charlie confirmed this at the recent Google Developer Day. Dr. Norvig said that the primary motivation behind Goog-411 is to provide something useful to Google's users, but the voice data the service collects will certainly help the company improve its voice recognition capabilities. This isn't surprising - Google has a proven track record of providing useful, free software that is ultimately a vehicle to feed the AdSense cash cow. Perhaps the more interesting question is how Google will put this speech database to work in the future. Such a database would be incredibly useful to deliver contextual AdSense for audio products. Of course, the injection process is a bit more complicated (and less dynamic) in a podcast as opposed to a web... Posted Jun 04 2007, 12:32 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Google, Advertising

• Google launches Google Apps Premier Edition

  As rumored yesterday , Google made a major announcement : a subscription package of premium, hosted business applications. (Man, Arrington's sources are scary good). The service combines GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs & Spreadsheets for $50 per user annually. I still insist that Microsoft is well positioned to compete with a hosted version that integrates with existing Office apps. There are elements about a hosted Office that are appealing, but there are just as many that are not - particularly in publicly traded enterprises. Aside from potential downtime issues, you're placing a lot of trust in Google and its security ( which may not be the best idea ). No word on any plans for a self-hosted server like their search appliance - to me, that would be key for broader adoption and erase a lot of these security and compliance concerns. Getting back to Microsoft, I'm still puzzled that they haven't done more with Foldershare. By integrating this technology with a Office... Posted Feb 22 2007, 06:04 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, Web 2.0, Business, Microsoft, Google, Enterprise

• Google bought the brand, not the technology

  Scoble says Google bought YouTube because it "realized it couldn’t make its own video service look as cool as YouTube." As I said before, Google was buying YouTube's audience and/or employees, not the technology . After listening to the Google-YouTube conference call, it definitely sounds like Chad and Steve were a big part of the purchase. Eric Schmidt gave them very high praise, comparing them to Larry and Sergey. Though I have to wonder if Larry and Sergey were this giddy when Google went public. (Mind you, I can't fault them too much, because I probably wouldn't act too much differently if I just made that kind of money). Posted Oct 12 2006, 05:23 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Rants, Web 2.0, Business, Google, YouTube

• Google launching Adsense for Radio

  Google has launched Adsense for Radio through its dMarc acquisition. They are already running ads on a Detroit radio station plan to make the service "generally available" within the next three months. Google also announced a deal with XM Satellite Radio today to automatically insert ads on non-music channels. Google Adsense has been so successful not because of the big name sites but because of what Chris Anderson would call the Long Tail of Advertising. I know that many podcast producers are still trying to figure out how exactly to monetize the podcasts and subsidize bandwidth costs. Google Adsense would do for podcasts what it did for the web - enable an entirely new market of small-time, "long-tail" producers in niche markets. Of course, it's not quite as easy with podcasts as they are generally downloaded as opposed to streamed. This raises real logistical problems when trying to figure out when and where ad insertion happens and how to accurately track the... Posted Aug 02 2006, 12:45 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Web 2.0, Google