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Google Voice dialed up for launch. Will it shake up the way you make calls?

Google just announced Google Voice, where the user can choose a Google number pointing your mobile or/and land line. This is the second attempt of Google to react to Skype after Google bought two years ago GrandCentral. You can read more of this initiative and watch Google's video about this new service here.

 

Facebook: Is it the new Google or the new Microsoft?

The latest edition of Wired is carrying an extremely interesting article on Facebook and its plans to dominate the Internet, comparing it with Google. I think that albeit the comparison is fair, it is missing a third –probably more relevant-player: Microsoft.

We all know that the social network is pursuing the aim of putting the users' social networks at the center of all they do online, and then try to monetize on top of that via highly effective marketing campaigns. We have also seen how that had to push back on both their Beacon initiative –injecting personalized advertising to users-, as well as on their attempt to change of terms of service to a perpetual ownership of user data. And we are probably all very aware that there is more to come. That’s why everybody these days compares Facebook and Google.

Having a huge user base, and sitting on tons of very personalized data is fine only if monetization is possible, and up until now it still remains to be seen how this will happen. Privacy issues seem to be simply too powerful.

But while Facebook’s efforts into highly targeted online advertising have received a lot of attention, their activities in the applications spaces have been less commented. The launch of Connect has allowed them to integrate more than 10.000 independent sites into the Facebook community. And just two months ago, it announced the Open Stream API. Both of the initiatives are a step towards becoming the platform for all personal interaction on the Internet. And this is indeed interesting. If Faacebook becomes the de facto platform for us users to place our data, and for third parties to develop applications that hook us to their sites, then Facebook may well become one of the gatekeepers of the Internet.
And we should not forget that gatekeepers normally have an extremely profitable business model. We’ve seen that for decades with Microsoft. So, will Facebook become the new Microsoft?

Decision-making assisted by a website

Hunch.com, a service that is supposed to aid in making decisions, was made public yesterday. With it, a question ("should I start my own business?") will get a pleasantly definitive answer (yes/no) after you are guided through several questions (it also profiles you first to give better answers). The topics and guiding questions are added and modified by users.

For me the interesting thing was not as much the answer that I eventually got (yes), but the different dimensions of my question it made me think about with those guiding questions. Will give it a try next time I wnat to get the first feel of an issue.

Wolfram Alpha

Right before Microsoft's Bing was announced, another new search-related website was getting the spotlight, WolframAlpha.com. Wolfram Alpha was created by Stephen Wolfram, who is also the creator of the highly respected research focused application, Mathematica.

While this new website has received quite a bit of attention recently, many people still seem to be somewhat confused about how it works. A lot of this confusion is probably sue to the fact that many people are calling the system a "search engine," but that is not really what it is. A more appropriate label might be a knowledge or “information engine.”

Wolfram Alpha lets you type in natural language questions, which it then tries to use basic public data to calculate an answer with. Wolfram and his team created a number of scripts that handle different types of questions by collecting, aggregating, and presenting a report of related data in an attempt to answer the questions.

Unfortunately, users must learn the forms of questions that Wolfram Alpha can process, and at this time, it is still fairly limited. However, once its limitations are understood, it can be used very effectively to perform calculations, and summarize recent factual data (such as “What is the population of…”). One of its advantages is that it will look for the latest data on a subject, which is something that may take time to find in a Google search, and may be out of date on a knowledge database such as Wikipedia. So, users of Wolfram Alpha have the advantage of not having to click through multiple sites compared to Google as well as potentially having more recent data than Wikipedia.

One of the big questions is how Wolfram Alpha plans to make money. One potential answer is that because its tools are very effective at summarizing relevant data, many organizations may want to use it in their internal data warehouses, or to produce hybrid reports using internal and external data. Wolfram Alpha may charge for custom uses of the system such as this.  Also, the site has posted its first banner ad, for Lenovo. Whether it will advance this model to include Google-style targeted ads based on the search terms remains to be seen.

Since Wolfram Alpha is a totally different type of tool, it will not likely compete directly with Google in the near future. It may become the go-to tool for finding simple, quantitative information about subjects that have publically available data on the web, but it will likely need to expand its language processing ability so that it can handle a greater range of questions for the general internet population to accept it. This could happen if the site is bought out by a bigger player, or if they receive a big investment by a believer in the technology. It will also be interesting to see if Google attempts to build similar functionality into their browser. They could be the greatest obstacle or enabler of Wolfram Alpha's future.

Microsoft's New Search Engine

Microsoft has come out with a new search engine. It's called BING. Check the demo video here. Forrester thinks it's promising. In fact, they go as far as to state that BING will change the face of search. Techcrunch likes it too. CIO magazine, however, is less impressed. ...I'm definitely giving it a try.