Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Google Awesomeness

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
Google Gets Scientific, Adds A Voice-Enabled 34-Button Calculator To Desktop And Mobile Search
Oh Google. Sometimes you’re so awesome...... Google search has long featured a built-in calculator function but a recent update added a fully functional 34-button scientific calculator. Previously, when a user entered, say, 2+2, Google would simply display the sum above the search result. Now, when that equation is entered into the search bar, the answer pops up along with the new calculator. Best of all, this works in mobile browsers and voice search, too.
This is an example of Google competing with itself. You excel when you do that.


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Big Data: It Is About Taking It To The Masses

Image representing GoodData as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
GoodData brings in $25M to supply Big Data analytics
GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. The company focuses on user experience, so all the tricky, technical elements of big data are comprehensible to people outside of IT teams..... dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year...... It was founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 and is now based in San Francisco. It has 180 employees.
Big Data has always been around. What is about to change is it is about to get to the masses. It is about to become as easy as email. Or as cumbersome, depends on how you look at it.

Your company needs electricity, it needs broadband, it also needs Big Data.


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Promoted Tweets, Promoted Updates

Logo for Foursquare
Logo for Foursquare (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Someone said FourSquare was the next Twitter. But that was a long time ago.

Foursquare Launches Promoted Updates, Its Newest Effort To Generate Revenue
Foursquare has partnered with about 20 merchants, from small mom and pop shops to national chains like Best Buy, to launch the pilot program. In the next few months, Foursquare hopes to turn Promoted Updates into a self-service tool merchants of all sizes can use on its platform..... Foursquare's 20 million users are checking in 5 million times per day. Foursquare currently has 120 employees.


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Urban Centers And Tech Innovation

New York City
New York City (Photo credit: kaysha)
Facebook Opens First International Engineering Office In London
The company currently has over 901 million monthly active numbers and estimates that over 80% of those users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
What is it about big cities? Most Silicon Valley engineers prefer to live in San Francisco, the city. They commute. The number one place for tech startups in America today is San Francisco, not Silicon Valley. And I intend to differentiate between the two. The number two place is not Boston or Seattle. It is New York City. Google has a major engineering presence in NYC. Many big tech companies do.

Big cities are attractive because that is where engineers want to live. Broadband is everywhere. So other than quality of life it is about the ecosystem. And the tech ecosystem is easier to build in a big city.

Frankly I think NYC is on its way to become number one by the end of the decade.



Does Geography Matter?


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