What’s Fun with Google Play

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If you have a Google account, you may noticed that there is something new. Most notably, the introduction of Google Play onto your navigation bar. Put simply, this service is Google’s answer to Apple’s iTunes. Google Play was once called Android Market, but it lagged heavily behind iTunes in both visibility and sales. This re-branding seems to be an attempt to capitalize on the trends in digital media consumption. According to the Pew Research Institute in 2010, 56% of all adults went online for leisure purposes. That’s double that said they did so in 2000. The research seems to suggest that a lot of this has to do with the ease at which people can personalize their internet experience. Google is aware of this and Google Play has several key features that address this yearning.

All purchases done on Google Play will be stored in the cloud which can be accessed by both your mobile and web devices. Anywhere you are, your purchases can go with you. Because they are stored on a cloud server, movies and books won’t eat up your hard drive space. That’s an advantage over iTunes which requires the additional iCloud services to do such a thing. Also, Play Music, Google’s audio arm allows you to upload up to 20,000 songs for free. Apple’s iTune’s Match costs 24.99 a year. All the things that you upload and purchase can be announced in status updates, another key aspect of a personalized internet experience.

The internet was first created as a communications tool for the US Air Force. After all this time, it hasn’t strayed too far from its roots. Social networking is an idea as old as time, but it is only recently that we can do it with such ease and over such distances. What has changed over the years is the brightness of consumer identity. Less are people defining themselves by race or birthplace, but more by what they buy. We all know that people who purchase nothing except Apple products and guys who wear V neck T shirts are saying something about themselves. Google Play delves into this dynamic. Users can post purchase updates to let their friends know what they are listening to and what they are watching. This is thanks to a wide array of other Google services that support what Google Play’s mission.

Any IT Consultant can tell you that e-marketing is about ease of purchase and security. Google has a near spotless security record. As for ease of purchase, they’ve got Google Wallet for that. The service makes purchasing goods, especially Google goods, just one click away. What could be easier? Sign into your Google account and you’ve signed into Google Wallet, Youtube, Google Play and much more. When it comes to leisure, simplicity is important. I don’t want to waste what little free time I have trying to watch a movie online.

Google Play represents a great chance for Google to cut into Apple’s commanding market share. It seems to play into every facet of a good e-business of the social marketing age. Purchases are kept in the cloud for ease of access anywhere. It allows purchasers to share their experiences with other users. Finally, it’s easy to navigate and even easier to buy things. Time will show us if Google Play is as fun as it says it is.

Legalizing Crowdfunding

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Say you’ve come up with the next big thing. A new social media platform that will put Pinterest to shame. An innovative IT outsourcing concept. A better mousetrap.

How do you get it funded?

Traditionally, the answer might have been a venture capital firm or a rich uncle. Now, thanks to a provision of the recently passed federal JOBS Act, it could be a thousand strangers on the Internet.

Crowdfunding is a relatively new way to gather startup capital for a new venture. Essentially, anyone with an idea can post it on their own website or the site of an intermediary company and ask for cash.

The most prominent example of the model so far has been Kickstarter, a site that’s funded a huge variety of creative projects, from video games to theater productions. But people who give to Kickstarter projects generally do so more out of enthusiasm than self-interest. The groups seeking funding offer rewards like backstage passes to their plays or signed copies of their novels, not a share of their profits.

Now, the JOBS Act makes it possible for ventures like these to offer an equity stake to the funders. Venture capitalist Michael Greeley of Flybridge Capital Partners told the New York Times there’s good reason to be enthusiastic about the concept.

“We’ve watched every other industry become democratized by the Internet, so there’s no reason that finance can’t be, too,” he said.

But others are more cynical, worrying that the new rules could allow for the creation of modern-day “boiler rooms” where scammers use high-pressure sales to fleece unsophisticated investors, and let small public companies remain too secretive in their activities.

Forbes.com contributor Tim Worstall takes on that line of reasoning, arguing that it’s impossible to regulate against all opportunities for scammers without completely stifling innovation.

Worstall points to British site Crowdcube, which allows small investors to buy a piece of startup companies, though it’s not open to U.S. funders. Where Kickstarter features mostly artistic endeavors, Crowdcube is full of plans to harvest seaweed, produce biofuels and develop new online payment systems. And where Kickstarter participants typically seek a few thousand dollars, Crowdcube companies’ goals are more likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Under the JOBS Act, companies would be able to crowdfund up to $1 million a year, or $2 million if they can provide audited financial statements. There would also be limits on how much any individual investor can put up.

The New York Times story reports that many people in the finance industry question how widely applicable the crowdfunding model will be. It seems likely to be best suited to startups with a lively, interesting story that can attract regular people, not just professional investors. Of course, those are also the sorts of stories that scam artists are fantastic at dreaming up.

Throttling: For You and America At Large

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The word unlimited is uttered and various images come to mind. Some people think of the sky, the stars, or the vast oceans that line the Earth. However, rarely do they think of a river being choked by a dam, allowing only a trickle of water through. AT&T and Verizon, the two largest wireless carriers in the world, seemed to have adopted that definition. The two companies have made it a habit of lowering the available bandwidth to the top five percent users on unlimited plans. This is even after both companies stopped offering unlimited data plans to new customers since 2011. One user has even sued and won, claiming he was defrauded since AT&T cut off his bandwidth when he was paying 85 dollars a month for unlimited data. The whole situation seems rather unsettling for both consumers and America at large.

AT&T made the claim that the top five percent of unlimited plan users were hogging too much of the available bandwidth. According to a new study however, this isn’t true. The study showed that the top five percent of tiered users consume about as much bandwidth as their unlimited plan cousins. The main difference is that tiered users pay for that bandwidth. It’s unsavory to think that AT&T and Verizon are engaging profiteering at the expense of what appears to be a clear cut ethical issue. Regardless of what your politics are about the regulation of business, all sides of the spectrum  agree that you should get what you pay for. Though not all the blame should be placed on the current administrations these telecommunication companies. Some, should be placed on their predecessors.

When Al Gore said that he invented the internet, he was referring to a group of legislative bills that he authored that helped spur the creation of infrastructure that would allow the web to exist. This broadband throttling speaks to a deeper issue. America, as a nation, is falling behind in broadband penetration. Currently, we rank 19th in the world, behind Canada, France and Bermuda. It’s true that bridges and roads are falling apart too, but internet infrastructure needs to be addressed. The United States is entering a post-industrial economic phase where technological services create more jobs such as in IT support and computer engineering. In my view, restoring the glory of the past is nice, but creating a future is realistic.

Throttling is an issue that should concern individual consumers and nation-states alike. It’s wrong for businesses to claim a product is one thing, but then to deliver something else. It’s equally wrong for the United States to put improving our data infrastructure on the back burner. However, as the wise man said, the first step of avoiding a trap is knowing there’s one there.

Of Websurfers and Writers: The New Googlebot

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Search Engine Optimization – it’s a buzz world. SEO is a set of techniques used by writers and website editors to make their content have better page rankings on search engines like Google and Yahoo. The end result is the attempt to generate more site traffic. Since Google is the world’s largest search engine most SEO techniques are aimed at appeasing the revered Googlebot. Googlebot is the algorithm that Google uses to categorize websites. Its sophistication is why you can type in beetle and car into the search bar and get websites about Volkswagen instead of insects in cars or a mish-mash of cars and insects. Web developers have used tricks to attempt to game the system. For example, typing in Beetle and car can give results about insurance and other unrelated search terms because the web developers used tags in an attempt to link to the two terms. Google has proclaimed that they want to level the playing field between sites that naturally pop up because of relevant content, and those who used tags and fake traffic to gain their page ranking. This new system has many implications for content writers and web users alike.

One of the major changes in the prolific search engine has been coined semantic search. It’s Google’s hope that their new search engine will understand how words work together to provide more poignant results. You may notice that sometimes when you type in common questions like: “How many feet in a mile?” that the search engine will display an answer for you: “1 mile = 5280 feet”. In the coming months you should expect more of that. Google plans on displaying more direct information in this manner. The hope seems to be to decrease time looking for information and increase the search engine’s accuracy. Google is strengthening the core of their customer satisfaction: finding quick and accurate information. The upcoming changes are a boon to web surfers, but it may have mixed feelings within the web content writers’ community.

SEO is a skill. Everyone who writes web content professionally boast about their SEO techniques, myself included. Over the years, I’ve learned that writing good content is the best SEO trick. If you build it they will come, but if you build it well you will have a repeat customer. Under the new system, businesses will be linked to what they are about. This effects everyone from IT consultants to book sellers. If you were to type in an author’s name, with semantic search, information about the author will pop up as well as a list of books and where they can be purchased. Searches can further be narrowed down by locations since Google now has access to all profile data. This may cause small to medium businesses to have more exposure. However, it is unclear how content makers will capitalize on the changes. What is clear, is that users are becoming more information savvy. They are more discerning about where and what they look at on the web. In the future, writing good relevant content maybe the only SEO trick. That works for me.

What Muppets Mean For Business Communication

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In the latest twist in the saga of Greg Smith’s very public departure from Goldman Sachs Group, Reuters reports that the firm is now scouring the company’s internal email in search of the word “muppet.”

In his New York Times op-ed attacking his former employer, Smith alleged that his coworkers there fobbed off bad investments on clients and insulted their intelligence. In particular, he said the firm’s managing directors referred to their clients as muppets—British slang that refers not to Jim Henson’s creations but to stupid people.

The Reuters story reports that the company is reviewing Smith’s allegations, in part by scanning internal emails. That action should serve as a reminder for office workers that nothing they communicate electronically from the office is their private business.

By now, most employees are probably well aware that it’s inadvisable to send an application for a new job on office email or visit inappropriate websites on a company computer. Back in 2007, the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitored their Internet connections and a full 28 percent had fired a worker for inappropriate email use.

But Goldman Sachs’ actions show that workers need to watch what they type even if they’re pretty sure their boss wouldn’t bat an eye at what they’re saying. If a company comes under scrutiny for any reason, there’s a good chance someone will dig into all interoffice communication. Sometimes, it’s an internal investigation like Goldman’s. Other times it’s a political thing—like the way reporters dug through the largely mundane emails from Sarah Palin’s time as governor of Alaska when they were released last year.

The biggest worry for most companies is that they’ll end up in some kind of legal dispute and have an aggressive lawyer wading through their internal emails. They may even get an IT consulting firm to help pull out messages that the sender and recipient thought had been permanently deleted.

Even failing to archive old messages can be dangerous in a legal battle because it might suggest that the company was trying to hide something.

The question of what to keep out of official business communication can become even more complicated when employees use company laptops or smartphones, or even when they use their own mobile devices for work purposes. Social media also blurs lines since it can be easy to lose track of whether a Twitter handle is a work tool or a vehicle for personal expression.

As with most things, it’s always a good idea to be cautious. At most companies, the best practice is probably to use email for uncontroversial work topics. Off-topic conversation, jokes and—especially—rants about a situation that’s causing problems should be saved for the water cooler or the bar after work.

And if you feel an urge to call a client a muppet, it’s probably a good time to just bite your tongue. After all, that’s what Kermit would do.

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